Sirmio is a promontory at the southern end of

Lake Garda Lake Garda ( it, Lago di Garda or ; lmo, label= Eastern Lombard, Lach de Garda; vec, Ƚago de Garda; la, Benacus; grc, Βήνακος) is the largest lake in Italy. It is a popular holiday location in northern Italy, about halfway between ...

, projecting 3.3 kilometers (2.1 mi) into the

lake A lake is an area filled with water, localized in a basin, surrounded by land, and distinct from any river or other outlet that serves to feed or drain the lake. Lakes lie on land and are not part of the ocean, although, like the much large ...

. It is celebrated in connection with the Roman poet

Catullus Gaius Valerius Catullus (; 84 - 54 BCE), often referred to simply as Catullus (, ), was a Latin poet of the late Roman Republic who wrote chiefly in the neoteric style of poetry, focusing on personal life rather than classical heroes. His ...

, as the large ruins of a

Roman villa A Roman villa was typically a farmhouse or country house built in the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, sometimes reaching extravagant proportions. Typology and distribution Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) distinguished two kinds of villas n ...

known as the Grottoes of Catullus on the promontory have been supposed to be his country house. Catullus, upon his return home from a long voyage, joyously describes Sirmio as ''Paene insularum, Sirmio, insularumque ocelle'' ("Sirmio, jewel of peninsulas and of islands") in his Carmen XXXI, ''Ad Sirmionem insulam''. A post station bearing the name Sirmio stood on the highroad between Brixia (modern

Brescia Brescia (, locally ; lmo, link=no, label= Lombard, Brèsa ; lat, Brixia; vec, Bressa) is a city and ''comune'' in the region of Lombardy, Northern Italy. It is situated at the foot of the Alps, a few kilometers from the lakes Garda and Iseo ...

) and

Verona Verona ( , ; vec, Verona or ) is a city on the Adige River in Veneto, Italy, with 258,031 inhabitants. It is one of the seven provincial capitals of the region. It is the largest city municipality in the region and the second largest in nor ...

, near the southern shore of the lake. On the shore below is the village of

Sirmione Sirmione ( Brescian: ; vec, Sirmion) is a comune in the province of Brescia, in Lombardy (northern Italy). It is bounded by Desenzano del Garda ( Lombardy) and Peschiera del Garda in the province of Verona and the region of Veneto. It has a h ...

, with sulfur baths. In 1880, the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, visited what he called "Sweet Catullus's all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio" in his poem "Frater Ave Atque Vale", the title referring to the last line of a famous

elegy An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, and in English literature usually a lament for the dead. However, according to ''The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy'', "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometime ...

of Catullus, on the death of his brother.

References

* Headlands of Italy {{Lombardy-geo-stub