After almost two thousand years, an unknown complex re-emerges at Villa Adriana

At Hadrian’s Villa, after almost two thousand years, an unknown complex from the Hadrian era re-emerges. The excavation campaign, directed by Professor Fabio Giorgio Cavallero, was undertaken in 2024 in the so-called Amphitheater of Villa Adriana, by the department of Humanistic Studies (Distum) of the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, on the recommendation of the director of the villa institute Adriana and villa d’Este-Villæ, Andrea Bruciati, and courtesy of Mic.

At the foot of Piazza d’Oro, the large building for parties and banquets built by the emperor Hadrian (117-138 AD), there is in fact an elliptical structure which since the sixteenth century has been believed to be a basin intended for baths or fish farming. However, in the 1990s, cleaning of the site brought to light some elements perhaps attributable to an amphitheatre. The results of the current campaign were surprising: the walls of a large complex from the Hadrian era that had never been documented until now emerged from beneath a few centimeters of earth.

It is a building over 25 meters long and 15 meters wide, composed of a large rectangular hall surrounded by eight rooms opening onto a terrace supported by pillars that remain over three meters high. This building was partly destroyed to make way for the so-called amphitheater but the rubble, rather than being removed, was used to create the plane on which the floor of the new elliptical structure was built. And it is for this reason that the excavation made it possible to recover both the marbles that covered the outside of the complex (including the pillars) and the plasters that decorated the rooms: white marbles, green serpentine, red porphyry and yellow painted plasters , red, green and decorated with intertwined ribbons, acanthus and pomegranates.

Until today, at Hadrian’s Villa, no such extensive and richly decorated complex was known, commissioned by Hadrian but then destroyed to make room for a new and different structure. “One fact is already clear: a new large building – declares Berta Martini, director of Distum – must be added to the complex structure of the villa desired and designed by Adriano, a UNESCO site which still today continues to offer, despite the over five hundred years of excavations and research, surprising discoveries”.

“Villa Adriana – declares the director of the Villæ, Andrea Bruciati – is today more than ever an active site of studies and a hotbed of innovation. The team from the University of Urbino has found a previously unknown building, adding a completely new page to the knowledge of the site. Enlightened and ambitious, Emperor Hadrian dedicated himself to a construction project made up of large and marvelous works, from which the extraordinary and varied ensemble of the villa arose. The exceptional nature of the site makes it a changing and primary palimpsest at the same time, inspiring in the Institute a project for the management and valorisation of the archaeological, monumental and naturalistic heritage based on interdisciplinarity and transversality”.