This colourful plaque, executed in micro-mosaic in the Roman manner, illustrates one of the most admired views in the neighbourhood of Rome, the celebrated Temple of Vesta of Tivoli. This hillside circular Corinthian temple, built in the 1st Century B.C., and enclosing the sacred fire, was romantically known in the 18th Century as the Temple of Sybil. This particular view was made famuos by the engraving of the architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (d. 1778), which featured in his Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de' Romani, circa 1761. While his son Francesco completed the publication of a detailed survey of the temple in his, Raccolta de' Tempi Antichi, 1780. It later provided the inspiration for part of the architect Sir John Soane's Bank of England in the 1790's. The circular temple was also associated with Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome and twin brother of Remus, which may account for the 1783 correspondence reference to the mosaic's subject as the Temple of Castor and Pollux. A similar view appears in the mosaic plaque executed in Rome in 1774 by Cesare Aguatti, who was considered the 'maestro' of a famous family of mosaicists at that time (see A. Gonzalez-Palacios, Il Tempio del Gusto, Milan, 1984, fig. 237); and it is possible that he was noted in the 1840 inventory of the Drawing-Room as 'a View of the Colesseum in Mosaic'