Tomba di Agrippina

On the shore at Marina di Bacoli, a curved Roman building has carried the name Tomb of Agrippina for centuries. Archaeology identifies it instead as a theatre-nymphaeum, part of a maritime villa that once extended up the hillside.

Why it matters

The monument preserves the shifting history of both the Roman coast and its later legends. Its architecture records the transformation of a small performance hall into a water-fringed nymphaeum as the Phlegraean ground moved. Its traditional name reflects the association made by Grand Tour antiquarians with the story of Agrippina the Younger, mother of Nero.

What to notice

Three concentric semicircular corridors give the building its fan-shaped plan. The lowest opens beneath the present beach level, reflecting changes in the shoreline. The middle hemicycle is covered by a heavy vault and faces outward through a façade of openings and windows. Brick semi-columns on the outer corridor were finished in stucco to imitate marble. In the lower corridor, panels of stucco survive among windows and curved niches. Traces of sloping seating in opus reticulatum reveal the building's first life as a small theatre. Later partition walls divided parts of the complex into storage rooms.

Context and history

Tacitus recounts that Agrippina survived an attempt on her life at sea near Bauli in 59 AD, only to be killed by Nero's assassins on shore. After Nero's death, her freedmen were said to have raised a modest mound beside the road to Misenum. Antiquarians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries associated that story with the Bacoli building, though its seaside location does not match the higher roadside burial described by Tacitus. In 1941 Amedeo Maiuri excavated the structure and identified its architectural history. It began as an odeion in the Augustan or Julio-Claudian period, part of a maritime villa, and was rebuilt as an exedra nymphaeum between the late first and early second century AD, probably after subsidence.