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Book about Villa Adriana

by Egenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Abstract of the book Villa Adriana il sogno di un imperatore

Villa Adriana: IL sogno di un imperatore has been written to collect and amend all the studies carried out, on this important landmark of Roman architecture by the author of this book, Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti, a work that she undertook in 1969.
Villa Adriana is an exceptional monument, fruit of the exceptional mind of a great architect. In this book his work is examined by a modern one: not certainly a great architect: just a middle way one. However it is not necessary to be Michelangelo to understand and appreciate Michelangelo, thus it was not necessary to be Hadrian to follow his creation from the first moment in which he conceived it, to the completion of his building. It was only necessary to love this masterpiece in which the most refined architecture, the incredibly advanced urbanistic and the most daring techniques of engineering and hydraulic had been realized. The project, which must have already been in Hadrian mind and maybe even on paper long before he became emperor, is a unitary plan, and to prove it we have the dating of the brick stamps which shows that all the supply of building material was ordered when the works began, and its quantity had been so well calculated that after the arrivals of the bricks in the working yards there had been no necessity to buy other ones..
Now, coming to the more detailed exam of the complex, we immediately realize that Villa Adriana is much more than an imperial residence: it is a little town, an ideal and perfect capital with all its imperial palaces; the retinue dwellings, guest-houses for his friends and important personages; dormitories for the servants and barracks for the soldiers. Moreover there are 4 baths -and the existence of other two is suspected ; two large theatres and an arena for gladiators’ games, which Hadrian, who was very good in the use of arms and loved this kind of spectacles, had made. A circus had also been planned but the emperor’s death blocked its works as it did for all the others unfinished ones in the place.
In short Villa Adriana had this two well guarded imperial palaces which were reached by external communications and to which not even the soldiers who had the task to guard over them could enter. In the area there were also 3 ample tricliniary areas for the banquets that from time to time the emperor had to give to his fellow citizens (1° -3 Exedras building, so called Stadium and Winter Palace; 2° - the Piazza d’Oro;3° - the Canopo ) and, to top this monumental part, a number of very interesting facilities completed this project. Among them remarkable are the capacious snow deposits.
As we have already told Villa Adriana is a small perfect town with many buildings scattered over its 126 hektares; all of them connected by a network of underground communications, some for pedestrian and some for carriages. As a matter of fact Hadrian, who had always hated the noisy traffic of Rome and, with one of his first edict had forbidden the passages of carts and horses in the center of the town, now in Villa Adriana solved the problem in a very brilliant way, Most important of his system was the Great Subterranean Way, a kind of subway ante litteram, through which it was possible to reach any of Villa Adriana’s buildings. It was 4,100 km long and, among other things, it served to bring in the complex all the fresh foods and the other things necessary for the daily life. In Villa Adriana all the supplies were fresh and for this reason there are very few storage spaces; (besides neither there are warehouse in all other suburban imperial residences: also there the food necessary for the meals was brought by daily caravans). The carts arrived early in the morning and, in the Villa Adriana, were put to wait the night exit hour in the impressive parking place of the Great Trapeze. There, after the vehicles had been detached and parked (there were places for 140-200 cart and carriages) the animals were led to their mangers (262 of them). From the different measures of the mangers found there and thank to the fact that they have the same measures of the modern ones, we know that there were 102 mangers for horses and 160 for asses or small mules.
Always by Aelius Spartianus we are informed that in Villa Adriana Hadrian had even reconstructed the Inferi: Etiam Inferos finxit. Recently it was noted that probably in memory of his initiation to the Eleusinian mysteries, the emperor-architect had built a large building, flanked by a narrow valley which ended in a small grotto, a reconstruction which had a clear resemblance to the great Telesterion Temple and its adjoining Plutonium, a cave symbolizing the entrance to the reign of the gods below.
Very interesting in Villa Adriana also if exclusively from the technical point of view were 1° - A ceiling of conglomerate covering a hall 9 m wide, a manufact which stood in place up to the end of the Empire, 2° - The quantities of lead contained in the soil of its archaeological area, an information which, among other things, fixed the length of time during which the piece of land had been watered and from this it was possible to extrapolate the time during which the occupation of the place lasted, 3° - The underground system of irrigation based of infiltration of water in a net of trenches with impervious bottom. A certain quantity of water was kept in the soil, and for the capillarity phenomenon, it raised up every time the upper part of the terrain dried up.


Bibliography
Pubblicazioni sull'argomento
E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI - Villa Adriana : il sogno di un imperatore, Roma 2001 Erma di Bretschneider