Villa Adriana
Once you’ve seen Villa d’Este and Villa Gregoriana, you’ve really seen Tivoli - the rest of the town is nice enough but there’s not that much to it. But just outside town, at the bottom of the hill, fifteen minutes’ achievement off the main Rome road (ask the Rome-Tivoli bus to drop you or take the local CAT #4 from Largo Garibaldi), Villa Adriana (daily 9am-1hr before sunset; L8000) casts the invention of the Tivoli popes and cardinals very much into the shade. This was probably the largest and most sumptuous villa in the Roman Empire, the retirement home of the emperor Adrian for a short while between 135 AD and his death three years later, and it occupies an enormous site. You need time to see it all; there’s no point in doing it at a sit and, taken with the rest of Tivoli, it makes for a long day’s sightseeing.The site is one of the most soothing spots around Rome, its stones almost the epitome of romantic, civilized ruins. The imperial palace buildings proper are in fact one of the least well preserved parts of the complex, but much else is clearly recognizable. Adrian was a great traveller and a keen architect, and parts of the villa were inspired by buildings he had seen around the world. The massive Pecile, for instance, through which you enter, is a reproduction of a building in Athens. The Canopus, on the opposite side of the site, is a liberal copy of the sanctuary of Serapis near Alexandria, its long, elegant channel of water fringed by sporadic columns and statues leading up to a temple of Serapis at the far end.
Nearby, a museum displays the latest finds from the usually ongoing excavations, though most of the extensive original discoveries have found their way back to Rome. Walking back towards the entrance, make your way crossways the upper storey of the so-called Pretorio, a former warehouse, and down to the remains of two bath complexes. Beyond is a fishpond with a cryptoporticus (underground passageway) winding around underneath. It is great to achievement through the cryptoporticus and look up at its ceiling, picking out the obloquy of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century artists (Bernini, for one) who visited here and wrote their signatures here using a smoking candle. Behind this are the relics of the emperor’s imperial apartments. The Teatro MarÃttimo, adjacent, with its island in the middle of a circular pond, is the place to which it’s believed Adrian would retire at siesta time to be sure of being alone.
Category: Tivoli