Corte Sgarzerie Cryptoporticus Site Features

A cryptoporticus is not a cellar or a crypt, though it looks like both. It is a piece of Roman civil engineering: a covered arcade, partly below grade, used to retain a slope and create a level platform on top of it.

What survives here is a stretch of barrel-vaulted gallery on heavy piers, in brick and local stone, running beneath the courtyard.

The vaults are plain and structural, with no decoration -- this was never a room to be seen, only a means of holding up the temple terrace above it.

Small openings at the upper level admitted light and air, the standard arrangement that distinguishes a cryptoporticus from a true basement.

Above ground, the Loggia del Mangano and the courtyard's arcades are medieval and later, built for the wool trade with no reference to what lay beneath.

The vaulted gallery

A run of Roman barrel vaulting on heavy piers, first century BC, and the only substantial surviving piece of the Capitolium complex.

What is not there

The temple itself is entirely gone. This is a foundation that outlived the building it was built to hold up, which is the usual fate of Roman substructures.

Corte Sgarzerie above

The courtyard and the Loggia del Mangano, named after the teasing and pressing of cloth -- a medieval wool yard sitting on a Roman temple platform.

The forum connection

Piazza delle Erbe, a minute away, is the Roman forum this temple stood at the end of.