History

Hadrian is unusual among Roman emperors in being an architect-emperor — he is credited (though the attribution is disputed) with the design of the Pantheon in Rome (rebuilt 118-125 CE), and his building programme at Tivoli shows a consistent architectural curiosity about non-Roman spatial and constructive ideas. The named buildings at Villa Adriana include explicit references to buildings and landscapes Hadrian had visited during his extensive provincial tours (121-125 CE and 128-131 CE): the Canopus references Egypt; the Pecile references Greece; the Serapeum references the cult of Serapis from Alexandria; the Academy references Plato’s Athenian grove. The villa is thus simultaneously a personal memory palace of an emperor who travelled more extensively than any of his predecessors and a laboratory of architectural ideas drawn from across the empire.

After Hadrian’s death in 138 CE, the villa was maintained as an imperial property under the Antonine and Severan dynasties; by the third century CE it was largely abandoned, and by the fourth century CE its lead pipes and marble revetments were being stripped for reuse. The systematic looting of sculptures began in the Renaissance (from approximately 1450 CE); by 1500 the major collections of Rome (the Farnese, the Este, the Mattei) had all acquired sculptures from Tivoli. The first systematic archaeological excavations began in the eighteenth century under the Marchese Alessandro Gregori Marcello; the site was purchased by the Italian state in 1870 and has been under systematic excavation since 1948.