Domus Aurea

Under the Oppian Hill lies the wing of Nero's Golden House that his successors buried and forgot: vaulted banquet halls, once faced with marble and lit by the sun, that became the grottoes where Renaissance painters copied walls and invented a whole style.

Why it matters

After the great fire of 64 AD, Nero took a huge stretch of central Rome for a residence so extravagant that history kept its name intact: the Domus Aurea, the Golden House. Rome's municipal record calls it the largest and most sumptuous of the imperial residences, running from the Palatine across the Oppian and part of the Caelian, with gardens, an artificial lake in the valley where the Colosseum now stands, and a rotating banquet room that Suetonius described turning day and night. The preserved Oppian wing consists of pavilions likely used for feasting; the Baths of Trajan were built over them, filling the rooms and sealing the frescoes underground. The site matters twice over: as the most direct encounter with Neronian Rome, and as the source of the grottesche style, named for the buried halls into which Renaissance artists descended to copy its decorations.

What to notice

The first impression is scale: these are single rooms the size of churches, spanned by concrete vaults with skylight oculus openings at their crowns, because the palace was built for light — rooms opened through porticoes onto the lake and gardens, and the walls were lined with marbles now stripped away. Look up at the surviving plaster: upper walls and ceilings carried frescoes and stuccoes of mythological scenes — Achilles, Ulysses and Polyphemus, Hector and Andromache — painted in a delicate, luminous manner that contrasts shockingly with the gloom of the buried state you see now. The architecture rewards attention too: the sequence of vaulted halls demonstrates Roman concrete used with an experimentation that anticipates the great imperial baths, and the eight-sided room with its oculus shows the engineering that made Nero's rotating dining room conceivable. Changing light and installations shape the interpretation of the rooms.

Context and history

Nero's architects, Severus and Celer, and the painter Fabullus built a landscape-palace rather than a house: pavilions separated by fields, woods and water, fronted by a vestibule that held a colossal statue of the emperor as sun god. After Nero's death the building became politically intolerable — his successors stripped its marbles and sculptures, backfilled the rooms and raised new monuments on top, the Baths of Trajan among them, which ironically preserved the wing you enter. The buried halls re-entered history at the end of the fifteenth century, when painters including Pinturicchio, Ghirlandaio, Raphael and Giulio Romano were lowered by rope into the grotte to copy the decorations; the fantastic vegetal and figure ornament they found gave its name to grottesche, one of the sixteenth century's defining decorative styles. Systematic interest in the remains as an archaeological site came much later, and the Oppian wing is now managed with the Colosseum's archaeological park.