09/02/2026
The University of Dallas is one of the most Italophilic universities in the country. What ties us to Rome and to Italy? One of the most obvious links is our Rome campus.
“... Ascanius then, / Now call’d Iulus, shall begin his reign. / He thirty rolling years the crown shall wear, / Then from Lavinium shall the seat transfer, / And, with hard labor, Alba Longa build” (Aeneid, Book One, vv. 267-271).
Upon arriving in Irving, University of Dallas students receive an immediate orientation to the primacy of place. In their first semester, they grapple with Virgil’s epic “Aeneid,” in which they read of Ascanius, son of Aeneas and founder of Alba Longa. Beginning with Livy’s “History of Rome,” some have identified the area near our Rome campus around Lago Albano — that “hill-embosomed lake” near Castel Gandolfo, as Mary Shelley called it in her short story “Sisters of Albano” — as the site of historical Alba Longa. When they get to Rome, our students begin to see the inextricable connection between our curriculum and the physical places of humanity.
There is no way to know with certainty where, or even whether, Alba Longa existed, but that takes nothing away from its very real literary existence, nor does it detract from the mythological strata accumulated in that place over time. Just down the way from Alba Longa and Lago Albano lies the University of Dallas Eugene Constantin Rome Campus, known colloquially as “Due Santi” for its location at an intersection said to have been traversed by both St. Paul and St. Peter. Of this place, University of Dallas alumnus and current Board of Trustees member Daniel Milligan has written that “places have an ability to draw people to them not only because of what may have happened there but also because what happened there is manifestly dependent on that place. Rome is such a place, and Due Santi is ideally positioned to reveal the truths and paradoxes of Rome.”
These two places, these two connections between the University of Dallas and the hills southeast of Rome known as the Colli Albani–the first reflecting the university’s dedication to the Western heritage of liberal education, the second exemplifying its fealty to the magisterium of the Church–do not even begin to exhaust the ties binding the university and the Alban Hills.
