Domus Aurea

Buried under the Oppian Hill, a stone's throw from the Colosseum, lie the vaulted halls of the most extravagant palace ancient Rome ever saw. After the great fire of 64 AD gutted much of the city, Nero seized the burnt-out land to build the Domus Aurea, the "Golden House": not a single building but a landscaped estate of pavilions, gardens, vineyards, woods and pastures spread across the Palatine, Oppian and Caelian hills, with an artificial lake in the valley where the Colosseum now stands. Walls glittered with gold leaf, precious stones, ivory and coloured marble. The Roman biographer Suetonius records that when it was finished Nero remarked that he could at last begin to live like a human being.

The architects Severus and Celer raised the complex in astonishingly little time, between 64 and Nero's death in 68. The surviving wing on the Oppian Hill was built for entertaining rather than living, a sequence of richly varied rooms opening onto courtyards, with fountains and pools inside. Its masterpiece is the octagonal hall, covered by a concrete dome with a great open oculus, an early demonstration of what Roman concrete could do; the rooms around it caught and scattered the daylight. Ancient writers also describe a banqueting hall that revolved like the heavens, and in the vestibule stood a bronze colossus of Nero more than 30 metres tall. The painter Fabullus and his workshop covered acres of wall and vault with delicate frescoes, and mosaics were set into ceilings rather than floors, an idea that would later shape the apse mosaics of Christian churches.

Nero's successors hurried to erase his memory. Within a few decades the palace was stripped, filled with earth and built over: the Flavian emperors drained the lake for the Colosseum, and Trajan raised his baths on top of the Oppian wing. Paradoxically, the burial preserved the paintings. Around the end of the 15th century they were rediscovered, and artists such as Pinturicchio, Ghirlandaio and Raphael were lowered into the dark chambers they took for caves, or grotte, to copy the fanciful painted ornament. From those 'grottoes' comes the word grotesque, and the style fed straight into Raphael's Vatican Loggias and, centuries later, into Neoclassical decoration. Rome itself, the Eternal City and capital of Italy, wraps around the site: the remains form part of the city's historic centre, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1980.

Getting there

The Domus Aurea lies in the Parco del Colle Oppio in central Rome, about 1.3 km from the city centre and a short walk from the Colosseum. The Colosseo station on Metro Line B is nearby, and Roma Termini, the city's main railway station, is about 1.5 km away. The nearest airport is Ciampino–G. B. Pastine International Airport (CIA), about 13 km away, while Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino Airport (FCO), linked to the city by direct trains, is Rome's main international gateway.