Home -> Articoli -> Villa Adriana

The Piazza d'Oro garden.

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Another very important garden is the Piazza d'Oro one. It adorned another luxurious reception and dining area and was enclosed by a double portico paved in opus sectile The garden was crossed in its middle by a low white marble euripus.
As many others in Villa Adriana this peristyle garden stood on a sloping tufa terrain with unsufficient soil covering for plants. To accomodate trees and bushes it was necessary to cut into the tufa planting holes, which were then filled with fertile soil. In our first campaign we emptied three large planting pits (approximately 2,10 m x 1,30 m x 0,80 m) which in the past had already been emptied and filled again, but never published.
Such pits are not unknown because there are some examples of them, as in the garden of temple at nearby Gabi, where the Spanish excavators found rows of carefully worked, almost square holes in the rock outcropping which the third century B.C. temple was built. The meaning of these holes was not immediately apparent at the time of the excavation, but a German scholar later recognized that the cuttings were similar to those that had been found by Dorothy Thompson in the rocky terrain above the Athenian Agora, so that plantings could be made around the temple of Ephaistus.
In our second season (1988) we continued works in the Piazza d'Oro garden, again with the help of Dumbarton Oaks and the Superitendency of Latium. It became obvious that the large planting holes continued in a double row around the edge of the entire garden, while in the middle the garden had been crisscrossed by other trenches probably to be connected to a flower beds plan, and if later on (XIX cent.) the area had not been used to plant olive trees breaking the Hadrianic clear cut furrows, we could easily have been able to reconstruct all the garden’s plan.

Bibliography
1. E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI -Villa Adriana: il sogno di un imperatore, L’Erma di Bretschneider, Rome, 2001.
2. W. F. JASHEMSKI ed E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, I giardini di Villa Adriana: rapporto preliminare , in RPAA, Vol. LX., 1987-88, pp. 145-169
3. E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI - Il sistema di irrigazione della Piazza d'Oro in RPAA, LXII 1989-1990, pp 121-150
4. W. F. JASHEMSKI ed E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI,, Preliminary excavations in the gardens of Hadrian's Villa: The Canopus and the Piazza d'Oro in AJA 96 , 1992, pp. 121-157
5. E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Adriano: architettura del verde e dell’acqua in Horti Romani, Rome , 1995, pp. 363-399.