12/10/2023 0 Comments Architect personality roman![]() ![]() Precisely angled windows channeled sunlight to hidden niches. Alcoves radiated off the main space underneath, inviting the eye to wander in unexpected directions. Rome’s Pantheon uses the same device to magnificent effect, but Nero’s Octagonal Room did it first. High overhead, an open hole, or oculus, invited the sky in. After all, this is the kind of thing, not ruling Rome, that turned him on. D’Alessio thinks Nero himself must have stayed closely involved in this grand-scale project. We know little of the two men who designed it-Severus and Celer. The ceiling mosaic surely influenced the Byzantines, who later plastered ceiling mosaics almost everywhere.īut the Domus Aurea’s boldest artistic innovation was surely its architecture. A micro-mosaic adorns the ceiling: It depicts in astonishing detail a scene from the Odys-sey. The space was dedicated to the nymphs, or female nature deities, whose cult of worship had spread throughout the empire. Splendid frescoes line some of the walls, in a style we recognize from the ruins at Pompeii-but the distinctive aesthetic, later expressed across the Roman Empire, originated here, at the Domus Aurea.Ī little farther on, D’Alessio led me to a room, its walls surfaced with roughly textured pumice, recreating a natural grotto. Nero's banquet hall is mostly in ruins today, but one of its most spectacular features remains: the oculus.ĭ’Alessio guided me from one high-vaulted gallery to another. This article is a selection from the October issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy ![]() Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 Completion of the project lies many years in the future. Even before Covid-19, the dig had halted while D’Alessio and his crew constructed an alternative drainage system to stabilize conditions inside. ![]() Sic transit.įor the past six years, D’Alessio has been supervising archaeological excavation of the sprawling Domus Aurea’s 150-odd rooms. Trajan’s memory-expunging project succeeded: The crowds who flock to the Colosseum across the street have no idea that the Domus Aurea is footsteps away. The emperor Trajan built his famous baths right on top of it, filling Nero’s vast galleries with soil to support the weight of the baths. One section remains, buried beneath the footpaths of Oppian Hill. The emperors who followed Nero swept it away in a frenzy, attempting to efface him and his works from Roman memory. All the dining rooms had ceilings of fretted ivory, the panels of which could slide back and let a rain of flowers, or perfume from hidden sprinklers, shower upon his guests.When the palace had been decorated throughout in this lavish style, Nero dedicated it, and condescended to remark, ‘Good, now I can at last begin to live like a human being!’” “Parts of the house were overlaid with gold and studded with precious stones and mother-of-pearl. “His wastefulness showed most of all in the architectural projects,” Suetonius writes. No modern scholar, and few ancient ones, believe he did, but you have to admit, the Domus Aurea seemed to give Nero a fairly good motive for arson.Īs the first-century Roman historian Suetonius describes it, the Domus Aurea was a home fit for a megalomaniac. It was one of the big reasons that the Roman public suspected Nero of setting the fire himself. The Domus Aurea, or Golden House, as the entire site was known, spread over almost 200 acres, covering the Palatine, Caelian and Esquiline hills of Rome. 64 to build a palace complex of staggering dimensions. The emperor Nero commandeered many of the neighborhoods razed by the Great Fire of A.D. ![]() Even before Covid-19, when the site was open to the public on weekends, few people came. I had an appointment to meet Alessandro D’Alessio, who oversees the excavation and restoration of what must surely have been, in its day, the world’s biggest royal palace. A cluster of nuns passed by, and one of them pointed me toward a poorly marked gate at the base of the hill-the entrance to the Domus Aurea, or what’s left of it, anyway. There was almost no one here, aside from a few young mothers pushing strollers along the pathways. I could see the crowds converging on the magnificent first-century amphitheater as I headed across the street to a small park on a hillock. The Colosseum in Rome draws close to eight million tourists a year, making it one of the world’s most-visited archaeological attractions. ![]()
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