Maison Carrée

Interesting facts

Despite its name, which means square house, the temple is a rectangle almost twice as long as it is wide.

The reconstructed dedication honoured Gaius Caesar as consul and Lucius Caesar as consul-designate, calling both princes of youth.

In the Middle Ages the temple served as the town's consular hall, divided into rooms on two floors with vaults, a fireplace and a spiral staircase.

Over the centuries it was also a private house, a stable and a church of the Augustinian friars.

A Duchess of Uzès once coveted the temple as a tomb for her husband, Antoine de Crussol.

From 1800 to 1807 the temple housed the prefecture of the Gard department.

Its great door is 6.87 metres high and 3.27 metres wide; the present door was made in 1824.

Above the columns the architrave is divided into three bands in the proportions 1:2:3.

Besides the Virginia State Capitol and the Madeleine, it inspired St. Marcellinus Church in Rogalin, Poland.

Norman Foster's Carré d'Art across the square replaced the city theatre, which had burnt down in 1952.

Why it is worth it

Two thousand years after it was built, the Maison Carrée still stands complete on its podium in the centre of Nîmes, columns, roof, pediment and all. It is one of the best-preserved Roman temples anywhere in the former empire. In 2023 UNESCO added it to the World Heritage list.

It was a temple of the imperial cult, dedicated or rededicated around 4 to 7 AD to Gaius and Lucius Caesar, the grandsons and adopted heirs of Augustus, who both died young. The bronze letters of the dedication were pulled off in the Middle Ages, but in 1758 the local scholar Jean-François Séguier reconstructed the text from the pattern of holes left by their fixing pins. The building follows Roman rather than Greek habits: it rises on a podium 2.85 metres high, measures about 26 by 13.5 metres, and puts its weight on a deep front porch taking up almost a third of its length. Six Corinthian columns carry the pediment, and twenty more are half-embedded in the walls of the cella; a frieze of rosettes and acanthus runs round three sides.

Its afterlife is as interesting as its origins. Thomas Jefferson, then American minister to France, had a stucco model of it made in 1785 and used it for the Virginia State Capitol, and the temple also inspired the Église de la Madeleine in Paris. From 1821 to 1907 it housed what became the city's fine arts museum, and the buildings crowded against it were cleared, restoring the isolation it had in Roman times. A restoration in 1988 to 1992 re-roofed it and opened up the square, revealing the outline of the ancient forum, and Norman Foster's Carré d'Art, an art gallery and library, now faces it across the square.

The windowless interior keeps nothing of its ancient decoration; it is used as a cinema showing a film of about 30 minutes, Nemausus, on the birth of Nîmes. Joint passes cover the city's three main Roman sites: the arena, the Tour Magne and the temple.

Getting there

The Maison Carrée stands in the historic centre of Nîmes, about 10 minutes on foot from the Roman arena, which is itself about 500 metres from Nîmes railway station. The nearest airport is Nîmes-Arles-Camargue (FNI), about 10 km away.

Maison Carrée

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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