EMPEROR AUGUSTUS'S FIRST HOUSE OPENED IN ROME
Boom of italian and international visitors at the Augustus’s first house opening in Rome this week: for the first time four stunning frescoed rooms, survived beneath emperor's two-storey palace, are opened to the public. There is the wonderful possibility to visit a dining room, a bedroom and a large entrance hall on the ground floor, and a small study on the floor above, but only five people at a time will be allowed in to see the rooms, due to their small dimensions and the great fragility of the frescoes.
Known since 1970s below the ruins of Augustus's sprawling imperial palace, the rooms were part of a smaller house, where he lived when he was still just Julius Caesar's adoptive son Octavian and not already Rome's first emperor: this is what the best experts believe.
But it was just in November last year that the archaeologists said they had found a grotto deep beneath the palace on the Palatine, which they argue may have been the shrine, where Ancient Romans worshipped Romulus, the founder of the city.
Experts also say that these frescoes are among the most splendid surviving examples of Roman wall painting, on a par with those currently housed in the National Museum of Rome at Palazzo Massimo and those also found in the house of Augustus's wife Livia.
The rooms are windowless, but it seems possible that they were receiving light from the entrance, as this one, at the time, were looking out onto very extensive gardens: now it’s blocked off by a wall dating to the reign of Nerone, from 37 to 68 AD.
Augustus has been both the first emperor of Rome and the architect of the famed “pax romana” or “Roman peace”, and, soon after seeing the mausoleum of Alexander the Great in Egypt, in 28 BC, he also began building the mausoleum. At the end of his life, he was entombed in his creation in 14 AD, and after him many other emperors, together with their loved ones, were buried in niches of the building.
For the restoration of this house a 1.5-mln euro have been used to obtain that all the fragments of the rooms' frescoes, found by archaeologists on the floor, would have been painstakingly pieced back together as the original. Also a 20-mln euro project is under way to restore the ruin and to redesign the square in which it stands and next year archaeologists really hope to succeed in opening to the public Augustus's resting place, a once majestic mausoleum all in white travertine marble that is now only an overgrown ruin in one of Rome's Fascist-era squares: most of the digs are still off-limits to visitors.
Guided tours of the Augustus's house are organized to admire this “miracle” of the archaeologism and will be covered by a new single ticket offering access also to the Roman Forums, the Colosseum and the Palatine.
(by Loredana Grandi)
Photo: One of the frescoed rooms in the Emperor Augustus's first house in Rome.