Mandela

Mandela is a town just to the east of Vicovaro, and like Vicovara it is situated 300 meters above sea level at the junction of the Licenza and Anio rivers. Horace mentions it in line 105 of Epistles I.18, when he implies that both his villa and Mandela are located near the Digentia (Licenza) River. In the middle ages, Mandela was known as Cantalupo-Bardela. In 1757 in a field belonging to the convent of S. Cosimato, a late-antique inscription was found mentioning Massa Mandelana in lines 6-7 (illustrated here on the left). From this, the ancient place name Mandela could be derived, since a massa in late antiquity was a collection of estates in the same general area. Typically, massae were denominated by the adjectival form of the toponym of the area. Hence, massa Mandelana implies a group of properties in the general area of Mandela. The discovery and transcription of this text are due to the Abbot Giuseppe Petrocchi, a notary of Vicovaro, who communicated it to his ex-student in the Seminar of Tivoli, Domenico De Sanctis, then arciprete of the city of Tivoli. De Sanctis realized immediately that the identification of Cantalupo-Bardela as Mandela added important confirmation to Holstenius' theory that Horace's Sabine villa was located in the Licenza valley. See De Sanctis' dissertation on the villa, Dissertazione sopra la villa di Orazio Flacco, Rome 1761.