This Article examines the significance of the Italian landscape and history drafted in the history of philosophy in some of the late poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, written between 1800 and 1806. The first chapter illustrates Hölderlin’s concept of the translation of arts and sciences (‚translatio artium‘) from ancient and modern Greece to south Germany. In this context, Italy is in contrast to Greece in most of his poems a possible but not a necessary step in the translational process. The second chapter deals with Hölderlin’s fragmentary poem ‚… der Vatikan …‘, in which the speaker is located in the city of Rome. The text describes Rome as a place, where throughout history a wrong kind of worshiping took place. Therefore, the city is designed as the prototypical location for the absence of the gods in the present time. The poem closes with the mythological description of the gods re-connecting to the world.