But in antiquity longer obviously but not inaccessible from Rome.
It was Hadrian obviously had no problems getting there in ancient Roman times.
It's an extraordinary place and Hadrian it was,
it was a place that Hadrian used as a kind of incubator for his architectural ideas.
And it's highly likely that many of the, of the, of the buildings that we
see there were designed in part by him, especially those famous pumpkin domes.
because we're going to see that a number of these buildings do indeed have
pumpkin domes designed under the influence of the architecture of Liverius.
It's an amazing villa.
It is the most extensive villa preserved from the Roman world and
likely the most grand of all the Roman villas.
And if we think back to Nero's palace in Rome, what made Nero's palace in Rome so
scandalous was the fact that it was located in downtown Rome.
But if you compare Nero's palace to [COUGH] to
Hadrian's villa at Tivoli, there's no comparison between the two.
Hadrian's villa at Tivoli is much more extensive.
It has a much more extraordinary buildings from the architectural standpoint, and
it was decorated even more opulently with a wide variety of sculptures,
mosaics, and paintings.
It was clearly an extraordinary place and if, if Trajan's Forum was in
a sense a microcosm of the extent of the empire under Trajan,
I like to think of Hadrian's Villa as the empire under Hadrian.
The empire that he travelled around so many times, and
I show you in the upper right, a map of the Roman Empire.
All of that orange area is the area that was
under Rome's aegis at the time of Trajan and into the years of Hadrian.
And if you look closely you will see three colored lines, a yellow, a blue, and
a red line.
Those are Hadrian's travels around the empire and
it shows you how extensive they were.
He went everywhere.
Why? Because he loved to travel.
He just loved to travel but
he also went in order to take a look at provincial affairs at first hand.
Now everywhere he went he either he himself paid for
buildings that were erected or more often than that.
Buildings were put up by local local magistrates and
so on, local cities in honor of Hadrian in order to
try to get a favor out of him, or just to honor him on his visit.
Some of these were rushed, you know, put up in a,
in a rushed job in order to be there when he arrived on the scene.
So we see this incredible array building activity during this period.
And we will see that reflected as we make our way beginning already next week.
Make our way into the provinces,
we will begin to see some very interesting Hadrianic buildings in those
provinces that reflect what he was doing elsewhere in Rome.
But what we see here, what we see at the villa is fascinating.
Because all of us, we're just back from break, some of you did some traveling.
We know that traveling expands all of our horizons.
We go someplace, experientially we're different than we were before by
what we see and what we experience.
And we also maybe not in this new economic climate but
at least in the past, we all tended to pick up souvenirs.
You know, a t-shirt here and a whatever there, handbag there.
And and we bring those back to remind us, remind us to make us,
you know have memories of, of the wonderful trip that we took.
Well Hadrian did that as well.
He collected souvenirs.
But because of his own wealth and because he had the imperial treasury behind him
he could, he could collect buildings as souvenirs essentially.
So when Hadrian traveled and saw what he liked, what he did was he came back
to this laboratory, this architectural laboratory that he had at Tivoli.
And he either created, some of these were probably designed by him,
others by his architects,
he created a series of buildings that were in a sense souvenirs of his travels,
either exact duplicates of things he saw, or variations on those themes and
it makes these buildings particularly fascinating to look at.
The, the villa of Hadrian was, had three, three,
essentially three building phases, and early, a middle, and a late.
They span the entire entire reign of Hadrian.
this, this villa was clearly Hadrian's hobby as well as his home, and
if he hadn't died in 138 he would have undoubtedly continued to build here.
So these buildings go up throughout the course of Hadrian's reign.
I show you a view from the air of the villa as it looks today.
You can see that there are a series of very attractive pools of
water interspersed with architecture.
If we look at a plan of the villa you will see that it is different than
any other villa we've seen before in that these buildings are actually kind of
casually almost in an ad hoc way, arranged around nature to interact with nature.
We don't see the axiology and
the symmetry that is so characteristic of so much of Roman architecture.
They kind of meander along as you might expect architectural experiments to man,
to meander.
And it has everything there.
Not only pools but
a wide variety of buildings that I'm going to show you fairly fleetingly.
This great island villa over here.
The Piazza d'ora, d'oro or the Golden Plaza.
Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
