Old Rome: A Handbook to the Ruins of the City and the Campagna

by Robert Burn

The ruins which extend along the side of the road, are plainly fragments of a kind of vestibule or grand entrance to the imperial villa. They consist of a nymphæum or grand fountain, and a row of chambers intended for slaves’ lodgings. The fountain is supplied with water by an aqueduct, the arches of which can be seen at the seventh milestone, where it leaves the lava rocks, and crosses the country towards Marino, at a higher level than even the Aqua Claudia. This nymphæum and aqueduct are built of opera mista, which shows that they are probably the work of the Constantinian Age.

The principal mass of the villa itself stood nearly half a mile from the old Appian Road, on the edge of the rocks of basaltic lava. Between them and the road the space was occupied by gardens and ornamental summer-houses and ponds. Nibby describes the chief ruins as having belonged to a richly ornamented fountain, and a suite of bathing-rooms of great grandeur.

One spacious saloon, the walls of which form a picturesque ruin, as seen from the new post road to Albano, stands on the edge of the rising ground, and commands a magnificent view of the whole of the Alban and Sabine Hills and the city of Rome. Near this was a small theatre, from which the cipollino columns of the entrance to the Tordinone Theatre in Rome were taken.

An immense quantity of valuable sculpture, now in the Roman museums and palaces, was discovered by excavations here in 1787 and 1792. Among these sculptures was a splendid statue of Euterpe, now in the Galleria dei Candelabri, a tiger now in the Hall of Animals; and the busts of Lucius Verus, Diocletian, and Epicurus, Socrates, the Isis and Antinous in the Vatican, with numerous Sileni, Fauns, and Nereids.

Casale Rotondo.

Between the sixth and seventh milestones from the Porta Capena there is a large round ruin 300 feet in diameter, called Casale Rotondo, now supporting a house and olive orchard upon the top. The fragments of sculpture found here have been arranged on the face of a wall, close to the pile of ruins. The name Cotta was found on an inscription belonging to this, and hence it has been supposed to be the tomb of the gens Aurelia, who bore the surname of Cotta. On the left are the arches of the aqueduct which supplied the Villa of Commodus.

At the eighth milestone there was a Temple of Hercules erected by Domitian. Martial mentions this temple in several passages. There are considerable remains of a tetra-style temple on the right hand of the road, consisting of columns of Alban peperino; but this, which was once supposed to be the Temple of Hercules, is now said to have contained an altar to Silvanus.

Bovillæ.

The Villa and Farm of Persius the poet is said by his biographer to have been near the eighth milestone. At the ninth stood the Tomb of Gallienus, and perhaps the ruins there belong to his suburbanum. At the tenth milestone, the Rivus Albanus, formerly the Aqua Terentina, is crossed; and at the eleventh, the road begins to ascend the slope towards Albano. At the twelfth, the circuit of the walls of the ancient town of Bovillæ is approached. Dionysius says that Bovillæ was situated where the hill before reaching Albano first begins to be steep, and this answers to the position of the modern Osteria delle Frattocchie. The ruins which are now generally held to be those of Bovillæ lie on the cross road, called Strada di Nettuno, a little way above Frattocchie.[134] They consist of a small theatre built of brickwork and opus reticulatum, and a somewhat larger circus, the enclosure of which and the carceres are still pretty well preserved. The town did not lie close to the road. It was founded by a colony from Alba Longa, and was a flourishing place until Coriolanus destroyed it. For centuries afterwards we find but little notice taken of it. In Cicero’s time it was a very insignificant village, and had it not been immortalised by the assassination of Clodius there, which led to such important results, it could hardly excite any interest in later times.[135]

The honour of being the native place of the gens Julia gave it some artificial importance in the imperial times. Tiberius is mentioned by Tacitus as erecting a sacrarium of the Julian family and a statue of Augustus there, and founding Circensian games in honour of the gens Julia. Some inscriptions found on the spot show the town still existed in the 2nd century A.D. It is now occupied by plots of land laid out as gardens. The Villa of Clodius, Cicero’s enemy, appears to have been at or near the thirteenth milestone from Rome, close to the left side of the Appian Road, between Bovillæ and the modern Albano. It was raised on immense substructions, the arches of which were capable of concealing a thousand men, and Cicero declares that Clodius had not respected even the confines of the Temple of Jupiter Latiaris or the sacred groves of Alba.[136] The ruins which lie under Castel Gandolfo, on the left side of the road towards the Porta Romana of Albano, may have formed part of the substruction of which Cicero speaks. The estate of Clodius passed after his death, when the family of the Claudii Pulcri became extinct, into the hands of the Claudii Nerones, from whom Tiberius inherited it, and thus it became imperial property.