Nearly 50 years after being closed for repair, a historic Roman imperial palazzo atop the city’s Palatine Hill was once again open to visitors on Thursday.
Kings lived in the almost 2,000-year-old Domus Tiberiana during the Imperial era of the ancient city. Views of the Roman Forum below are expansive thanks to the size of the palace.
Following decades of structural repair work to strengthen the palace for safety reasons, the public is now able to tour it. Following the fall of the empire, excavations discovered artifacts from centuries of Roman life.
In a written description of the reconstructed palazzo, the director of the Colosseum Archeological Park, which encompasses the Palatine Hill, referred to it as “the power palace par excellence.”
A first-century Roman poet was cited by the official, Alfonsina Russo, as claiming that the expansive palace appeared “infinite” and that “its grandiosity was just like the grandiosity of the sky.”
The palace’s foundations were found to date from the reign of Nero, just after the fire of 64 A.D. that destroyed most of the city, despite the fact that the domus, or home, is named after Tiberius, who controlled the empire after Augustus’s death.
The house was abandoned for centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire, until the Farnese noble family created a sizable garden all around the ruins in the 1500s.
Today’s visitors can better understand the journey that ancient emperors and their courts used to come to the domus as a result of the palazzo’s reopening to the public.
The lavish imperial house atop the Palatine, one of ancient Rome’s seven hills, served as the model for the English word “palatial”.
The first authentic imperial palace is thought to have been the domus, which was constructed on the hill’s northwest slope. In addition to the emperor’s house, the complex had gardens, temples, living rooms for the Praetorian Guard, who guarded the emperor, and a service area for employees that looked out onto the Roman Forum.
Archaeologists were able to piece together what Russo refers to as centuries of history in a location that “somehow went forgotten” thanks to excavation and restoration work done also during the coronavirus pandemic when tourism was at a low for months. Visitors to the reopened domus can view a collection of hundreds of antiquities, including items made of glass and metal. Also discovered were statues, decorative items, and coins from antiquity.
