Villa di Tiberio e la Grotta cronologia storica

Ultimo aggiornamento il 8 ottobre 2026

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I sec. a.C. A Sperlonga viene costruita una villa di età repubblicana, accanto alla grotta marina naturale da cui il luogo prende nome: il nome romano, Spelunca, è semplicemente il latino per cavità.
14 La villa passa all'imperatore Tiberio, che trasforma la grotta in triclinio: una sala da pranzo aperta sul mare, con dentro una vasca circolare, i letti su un'isola nella peschiera e quattro gruppi scultorei dall'Odissea disposti per essere letti da lì.
26 La grotta crolla e per poco non uccide Tiberio: il cedimento è ricordato sia da Tacito sia da Svetonio. In quel crollo o in uno successivo le sculture vengono ridotte in migliaia di frammenti.
550 Dopo la caduta dell'Impero d'Occidente, nel VI secolo, la popolazione locale si ripara nelle rovine della residenza imperiale, e in seguito comincia a spostarsi sul vicino promontorio di San Magno, dove oggi sorge Sperlonga.
1957 Gli operai che costruiscono la strada costiera appena sopra il sito portano alla luce le sculture. Segue un intervallo di disturbo prima che cominci una direzione archeologica adeguata, e si perde la posizione esatta di diversi grandi frammenti; in agosto Giulio Iacopi del Museo Nazionale Romano ottiene il permesso di dirigere lo scavo.
1963 A Sperlonga viene istituito un museo per esporre le sculture ricomposte e gli altri rinvenimenti della villa, con ricostruzioni in calco dei grandi gruppi accanto agli originali rimontati.

Verificato su Wikipedia, ottobre 2026.

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Verificato su Wikipedia — Sperlonga is on the coast of the province of Latina roughly halfway between Rome and Naples, is one of I Borghi piu belli d'Italia, and has Terracina to the west, Fondi to the north, Itri to the north-east and Gaeta to the east; the Roman name Spelunca is the Latin for cave, a Republican villa was built here and later came into the hands of Tiberius who turned the grotto into a magnificent triclinium, and after the fall of the Western Empire in the sixth century the ruins served as a refuge for local people who later began moving to the nearby promontory of St Magnus, The Sperlonga sculptures are a large and elaborate ensemble of ancient sculptures discovered in 1957 in the grounds of the former villa of the Emperor Tiberius at Sperlonga, on the coast between Rome and Naples; as reconstructed they were arranged in groups around the interior of a large natural grotto facing the sea used by Tiberius for dining, and many scholars believe he had them installed, portraying incidents from the story of Odysseus in an evocative Hellenistic style generally thought to date to the early Imperial period, As Tacitus and Suetonius recount, the grotto at Sperlonga collapsed in 26 AD, nearly killing Tiberius, and either then or in a later fall the sculptures were crushed into thousands of fragments, so that modern reconstructions have many missing elements; a museum was established in 1963 at Sperlonga to display the reconstructed sculptures and other finds from the villa, with cast reconstructions of the large groups described by the classicist Mary Beard as "creative reinventions", many elements being seen twice as pieced-together originals and as reconstructions using plaster casts filled out with educated guesswork, The initial discovery of the Sperlonga sculptures in 1957 was by civil engineers building the coastal road just above the site, and there was an interval of disturbance to the site before it began to be excavated under proper archaeological direction, which has left the exact original location of some large fragments regrettably imprecise, allowing for prolonged arguments over which pieces belong to which group and where the groups originally were, gradually resolved as smaller pieces recorded more professionally are married up in the continuing process of reconstruction; in August 1957 Giulio Iacopi, an archaeologist at the Museo Nazionale Romano, finally got permission to lead excavations (ottobre 2026).

Villa di Tiberio e la Grotta cronologia storica

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