Monte Mario: the inscription revisited

Before we go any further, in case you may be rusty on the topography of Rome's environs, I recommend checking a topographic map -- such as this excellent interactive one, from the classics department website of Skidmore College in New York State.

You can explore by mousing-over, obviously, but 14 is the Janiculan, and 16 is the Vatican Hill. You will not find Monte Mario here because it is way off to the north of the Vatican, past the top of the page. Remember that; it's important to our story.

The reason I'm blogging about Julius Martial on Monte Mario in the first place, other than generally thinking it is cool that part of an epigram has been inscribed there, is that it takes some arguing to place the villa there.

Here's that inscription again:

And here's how I translated those five lines for the World's Classics:

From here, on the one side, you can see the seven imperious hills and take in all of Rome -- the Alban hills too, and the Tusculans, and every cool spot in the city's orbit; and ancient Fidenae, and little Rubrae,...

The next two lines go "and the fruitful orchard of Anna Perenna that delights in virgins' blood", which might have been a bit much for the twentieth-century city planners (? -- I'm guessing) who had the lines set up. Certainly the spring of Anna Perenna, the location of which is now precisely known (found when excavating an underground car park in 1999), is slap bang in the middle of the field of view from the belvedere terrace. In any case, shorter is better with inscribed epigram. Simonides could have told you that.

The problem is that Martial kicked off the poem by telling us, or seeming to, that his chum's villa is somewhere else entirely...