Domus Aurea site features

The Domus Aurea is entered underground, below the Oppian Hill, and what you walk into is not a ruin in the open air but the inside of a buried building: a succession of tall brick-faced corridors and halls under barrel and pavilion vaults, running away into darkness in both directions, lit only by what the site's own lamps provide.

The surfaces tell you what was taken. Up to about head height and a little beyond, the walls are bare masonry and rough plaster — this is where the marble revetments were, and they are gone. Above that line the upper walls and the ceilings still carry painted and stuccoed decoration, in faded reds, ochres and whites, with mythical figures — Achilles and Scirus, Ulysses and Polyphemus, Hector and Andromache.

The light is the thing to understand. Turismo Roma says it directly: the rooms are now dark and gloomy, but originally light was the predominant characteristic, when every room opened onto a portico looking over a valley with an artificial lake and gardens around it. Standing inside, you are in a half-lit cellar; the building was designed as a sunlit terrace.

The scale reads in the plan rather than the eye. The main nucleus was built around two pentagonal courtyards, which joined the western and eastern sectors of the palace. The whole residence covered about one square mile, from the Palatine to the Oppian and part of the Caelian — not rooms within a building, but pavilions separated by gardens and woods.

And one room was a machine. The coenatio rotunda was a great octagonal hall under a pavilion vault which, according to Suetonius, rotated on itself day and night.

Underfoot and overhead the mass is obvious. Above the vaults sits the earth the successors poured in and the foundations of the Baths of Trajan; the space feels less like a palace than like a crypt carved out of a hillside — which is, physically, what two thousand years have made of it.

The coenatio rotunda

A great octagonal hall with a pavilion vault which, according to Suetonius, rotated on itself day and night.

The two pentagonal courtyards

The main nucleus of the palace, acting as the junction between the western and eastern sectors.

The ceilings and upper walls

Where the surviving decoration is: paintings and stuccoes of mythical figures — Achilles and Scirus, Ulysses and Polyphemus, Hector and Andromache. The marble revetments below them are lost.

The vanished lake

The palace was arranged around an artificial lake in the valley where the Colosseum now stands.

The colossal statue

An enormous vestibule held the colossal statue of the emperor in the guise of the Sun God.

The Oppian pavilions

The part that is visitable today, probably intended for feasts and banquets, buried by the great baths of Trajan.

The grottoes of the Renaissance

Where Pinturicchio, Ghirlandaio, Raphael and Giulio Romano lowered themselves from above and copied the motifs that became known as grottesche.

The statues from Greece and Asia Minor

The rooms were enriched with statues brought from Greece and Asia Minor.