Santuario di Diana Nemorense

On the terraced slope between the town of Nemi and its lake lie the remains of one of Latium's great religious complexes, the grove sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis. Its story spans a Bronze Age settlement, a federal cult of the Latin cities, and four centuries of patient excavation.

Why it matters

Diana's sanctuary gave Nemi its ancient identity: the settlement's very name descends from the Nemus Dianae, the sacred wood that clothed this valley. The municipal portal records that the site was frequented from the Middle Bronze Age, around the fifteenth century BC, and that it later acquired political weight as a federal centre of the Latin cities — a place where cult and diplomacy met, comparable in ambition to the great terraced sanctuaries of Gabii, Lanuvio, Tivoli, Palestrina and Terracina. The monumental layout you can trace today took shape in the late second century BC across three scenic terraces, packing porticoed niches, votive chambers, a theatre, baths, priestly quarters, the temple itself and fountains fed by a nymphaeum attributed to Caligula into one disciplined composition.

What to notice

The sanctuary's remains occupy three terraces on the hillside. The upper ground held the temple, rebuilt in stone after an earlier wooden predecessor decorated with terracottas; the middle terraces carried the votive cells and porticoes where pilgrims left their offerings; below, the theatre and bath buildings served the crowds who came for festivals. The municipal history notes that a 1924 state investigation of the theatre and thermal buildings was reburied after recording, so part of the complex survives below ground by design. The Museo delle Navi Romane preserves votive materials from the sanctuary and a section of basalt paving from the clivus Virbii, the road by which worshippers travelled from Ariccia.

Context and history

Scholars have chased this site since the sixteenth century: the first recorded discovery, a dedication to Diana published in 1550, is now in Rome's Capitoline Museums. Systematic digging began in the 1600s on the initiative of the Frangipane marquises, and through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the finds flowed outward to museums in Copenhagen, Palma de Mallorca, Nottingham, Boston, Philadelphia and Rome's Villa Giulia — a diaspora that documents both the sanctuary's fame and the era's careless excavating. In 1895 the antiquarian Eliseo Borghi worked the sanctuary while also attempting to raise Caligula's ships from the lake. The Lazio Superintendency opened the modern campaign in 1989, concentrating on the north-eastern corner of the terrace, the votive cells, the temple and the upper terrace, and publication of those campaigns continues. The cult declined from the second century AD and faded after Christianity took root, leaving the valley to woods and terraces.