Outside the entrance to Nero’s Domus Aurea (Golden House), the Parco di Colle Oppio is dotted with remnants of the various Roman structures that once stood here: various piles of rubble, the remains of Trajan’s baths, and a number of round brick stumps – well heads that led down into the Golden House. These apart, the park is a pretty unsavoury place, a gathering place for street people and fascist youths, and as such not particularly innocuous after dark.
Entries with nero tag
House Of The Vestal Virgins
The House of the Vestal Virgins is a second-century AD reconstruction of a building originally built by Nero. Vesta was the Roman goddess of the hearth and home, and her cult was an important one in ancient Rome. Her temple was in the charge of the so-called vestal virgins, who had the responsibility of keeping the unnameable flame of Vesta alight, and were obligated to remain chaste for the thirty years that they served (they usually started at around age ten). If the flame should go out, the woman responsible was scourged; if she should lose her chastity, she was buried alive (her male partner-in-crime was flogged to death in front of the Curia). Because of the importance of their office, they were accorded special privileges; a choice section in the Colosseum was reserved for them; only they and the empress could ride in a wheeled vehicle within the confines of the city; and they had the right to pardon any criminal who managed to get close enough to one of them to beseech their mercy. A vestal virgin could resign her post if she wished, and she had the benefit of residing in a very comfortable palace: four floors of rooms around a central courtyard, with the round Temple of Vesta at the near end. The rooms are mainly ruins now, though they’re evenhandedly recognizable on the Palatine side, and you can get a good sense of the shape of the place from the remains of the courtyard, still with its pool in the centre and fringed by the statues or inscribed pedestals of the women themselves.
Domus Aurea
Via Labicana 136. Daily 9am-8pm, guided tours obligatory; L10,000, plus L6000 for the mandatory tour, plus L2000 reservation fee – L18,000 in total. Booking is strongly recommended, tel 06 3974 9907. The entrance is off Via Labacana, in the Parco Oppio, almost opposite the Colosseum. (Do not continue up the path into main part of the park.) One of the Esquiline Hill’s most intriguing sights is without doubt Nero’s Domus Aurea or “Golden House”, built on the summit of the Oppian and into its sides after a fire of 64 AD devastated this part of Rome. This “house” was a vast undertaking, but it was not intended to be a residence at all; rather it was a series of banqueting rooms, nymphaeums, small baths, terraces and gardens, covering what at the time was a small lake fed by the underground springs and streams that drained from the surrounding hills. Rome was used to Nero’s excesses, but it had never seen anything like the Golden House before. The deception was supposed to have been coated in solid gold, there was hot and cold running water in the baths, one of the dining rooms was rigged up to shower flowers and natural scent on guests, and the grounds – which covered a full square mile – held vineyards and game. Nero didn’t get to enjoy his palace for long – he died a couple of years after it was finished, and Vespasian tore a lot of the exposed deception down in disgust, draining its lake and building the Colosseum on top. Later Trajan built his baths on top of the rest of the complex, and it was pretty much forgotten until its surround paintings were discovered by Renaissance artists, including Raphael. When these artists first visited these rooms, they had to descend down ladders into what they believed at first was some kind of mystical cave, or grotto – giving us the word grotesque, which they used to describe their attempts to imitate this style of painting in their own work.
Today it is doable to visit parts of the Golden House, which have recently been opened under the Trajan’s baths. Tours start by taking you down a long corridor into the excavated rooms of the palace. The temperature always hovers at around 10°C and this, and the almost 100 percent humidity, makes it necessary to wear a sweater or crown even in the dead of the Roman summer
Inside the Domus Aurea
Tours can at first be confusing, as you become aware of just how much Trajan set out to slur the palace with his baths complex – the baths’ foundations merge into parts of the palace, and vice versa – but a free plan, not to mention the guide, helps you sort it out. There are various covered fountains, service corridors, terraces and, most spectacularly, the Octagonal Room, domed, with a hole in the middle, which is supposed to have rotated as the day progressed to emulate the passage of the sun. Most of the rooms are decorated in the so-called Third Pompeiian style, with fanciful depictions of people looking out windows at you, garlands of flowers, fruit, vines and foliage, interspersed with mythical animals. Perhaps the best preserved frescoes are in the room of Achilles at Skyros, and illustrate Homer’s story of Achilles being sent to the island of Skyros disguised as a woman to prevent him being drawn into the Trojan wars. In one fresco, Achilles is in drag at the Skyros court; another shows him putting his female clothes aside and picking up a shield, brought to him by Odysseus (in the crested helmet) to catch him out and betray his disguise
Colosseum
Summer Tues-Sat 9am-6pm, Sun 9am-1pm; winter Tues-Sat 9am-3pm, Sun 9am-1pm; L10,000; L20,000 for a ticket that includes the Palatine, Palazzo Altemps and Palazzo Massimo. The Colosseum is perhaps Rome’s most awe-inspiring ancient monument, and one which – unlike the Forum – needs little historical knowledge or imagination to deduce its function. This enormous structure was so solidly built that the depredations of nearly 2000 years of earthquakes, fires, riots, wars, and, not least, being plundered for its seemingly inexhaustible supply of ready-cut travertine blocks (the Barberini and Cancelleria palaces, even St Peter’s, all used stone from here), still stands between the Roman Forum and the hills immediately south and east. It’s not much more than a shell now, ingested away by pollution and cracked by the vibrations of cars and metro; around the outside, the arches would originally have held statues, and there are gaping holes where metal brackets linked the great blocks together. The basic structure of the place is cushy to see, however, and has served as a model for stadiums around the world ever since. You’ll not be alone in appreciating it, and during summer the combination of people and scaffolding can make a visit more like touring a contemporary building-site than an ancient monument. But visit late in the evening or primeval morning before the tour buses have arrived, go up a level to get a real sense of the size of the building, and the arena can seem more like the marvel it really is.
Seeing the Colosseum
Originally known as the Flavian Amphitheatre (the study Colosseum is a much later invention), it was begun around 72 AD by the emperor Vespasian, who was anxious to extinguish the memory of Nero, and so chose the site of Nero’s outrageous Domus Aurea for the stadium; the Colosseum is sited on a lake that lay in front of the vestibule of the palace, where Nero had erected a statue of himself as sun god. The lake was drained, and the Colosseum was – incredibly, given the size of the project – inaugurated by Vespasian’s son Titus about eight years later, an event celebrated by 100 days of continuous games; it was finally completed by Domitian, Titus’s brother, the third of the Flavian emperors.
Up until this time gladiatorial and other bloody games had been conducted in a makeshift stadium in the Roman Forum, near the Curia. The stands were temporary and constructed of wood, and had to be erected and taken down every time there were games. It is said that seventy thousand Hebrew slaves did the heavy work at the Colosseum. Fifty thousand cartloads of pre-cut travertine stone were hauled from the quarries at Tivoli, a distance of seventeen miles. In the depths of what must have been the muddy bottom of the lake, a receptor was ordered out, walling in passages for the contestants and creating areas for assembling and storing sets, scenery and other requirements for gladiatorial contests.
The overall structure was tastefully designed, with close attention paid to decoration. On the outside, the arena’s three arcades rose in strict classical fashion – with Ionic, topped by Doric, topped by Corinthian, columns – to a flat surface at the top punctuated only by windows, where there was a series of supports for masts that protruded at the upper limit. These masts, 240 in total, were used to array a canvas awning over the spectators inside the arena. Inside, beyond the corridors that led up to the seats, lavishly decorated with painted stuccoes, there was room for a total of around 60,000 people seated and 10,000 or so standing; and the design is such that all 70,000 could enter and be seated in a matter of minutes – surely a lesson for designers of modern stadiums.
The seating was allocated on a strict basis, with the emperor and his attendants naturally occupying the best seats in the house, and the social class of the spectators diminishing as you got nearer the top. There were no ticket income as we conceive of them; rather, tickets were distributed through – and according to the social position of – Roman heads of households. These “tickets” were in fact wooden tags, with the entrance, row, aisle and seat number carved on them.
Inside the amphitheatre, the receptor below was covered over with a wooden floor, punctuated at various places for trap doors which could be opened as required and lifts to raise and lower the animals that were to take part in the games. The floor was covered with canvas to make it waterproof and the canvas was covered with several centimetres of sand to absorb blood; in fact, our word “arena” is derived from the Latin word for sand
The Roman Empire
A triumph for the new democrats over the old guard, Augustus (27 BC-14 AD) – as Octavian became known – was the first true Roman emperor, in firm control of Rome and its dominions. Responsible more than anyone for heaving Rome into the Imperial era, he was determined to turn the city – as he claimed – from one of stone to one of marble, building arches, theatres and monuments of a magnificence suited to the capital of an expanding empire. Perhaps the best and certainly the most politically canny of Rome’s many emperors, Augustus reigned for forty years. He was succeeeded by Tiberius (14-37), who ruled from the island of Capri for the last years of his reign, and he in turn by Caligula (37-41), who was assassinated after just four years in power. Claudius (41-54), his uncle, followed, at first reluctantly, and evidenced to be a wise ruler, only to be succeeded by his stepson, Nero (54-68), whose reign became more notorious for its excess than its prudence, and led to a brief period of warring and infighting after his murder in 68 AD. Rome’s next rulers, the Flavian emperors , restored some stability, starting with Vespasian (69-79), who did his best to slur all traces of Nero, not least with an enormous ampitheatre in the grounds of Nero’s palace, later known as the Colosseum, and ending with the emperor Trajan (98-117), under whose rule the empire reached its maximum limits. Trajan died in 117 AD, giving way to Hadrian (117-138), who continued the grand and expansionist agenda of his predecessor, and arguably provided the empire’s greatest years. The city swelled to a population of a million or more, its people housed in cramped apartment blocks or insulae; crime in the city was rife, and the traffic problem apparently on a par with today’s, leading one contemporary writer to complain that the din on the streets prefabricated it impossible to get a good night’s sleep. But it was a time of peace and prosperity, the Roman upper classes living a life of indolent luxury, in sumptuous residences with proper plumbing and central heating, and the empire’s borders being ever more extended.
The decline of Rome is hard to date precisely, but it could be said to have started with the emperor Diocletian (284-305), who assumed power in 284 and divided the empire into two parts, easterly and west, while becoming known for his relentless persecution of Christians. The first Christian emperor, Constantine (312-337), shifted the seat of power to Byzantium in 330, and Rome’s heady period as capital of the world was over, the wealthier members of the population moving easterly and a series of invasions by Goths in 410 and Vandals about forty years later only serving to quicken the city’s ruin. By the sixth century the city was a devastated and infection-ridden shadow of its former self, with a population of just 20,000.
Genoa Addressses
Note that Genoa is one of the handful of Italian cities that, for some reason, has an unnecessarily complicated double system of street-numbering: commercial establishments (such as bars and restaurants) have red numbers ( rosso ), while all other buildings have black numbers ( nero ) – and the two systems don’t run in tandem. This means, for example, that Via Banchi 35r might be next-door to Via Banchi 89n, but several hundred metres from Via Banchi 33n. There’s no logic or purpose to it at all.
