Temple of Juno

Description

The building is a peripterotic Doric temple, with six columns on the short sides (hexastyle) and thirteen on the long sides, according to a canon derived from the models of the Greek homeland and also used for its "twin", the Temple of Concordia, with which it shares general dimensions. The temple's floor plan is around 38 x 16.9 m.

The front columns differ slightly in width, tapering at the ends and swelling at their middles. The peristyle of thirty-four 6.4 metre-high columns, each formed from four stacked drums, rests on a crepidoma of four steps. The whole edifice is on a raised, largely artificial, spur. In front of the eastern face are notable remains of the ancient altar.

The interior is composed of a cella, with no internal colonnade, of the double antis type, with its pronaos at the front mirrored by the opisthodomos at the back, both framed by two ranks of columns (distyle). Two stairs for the inspection of the roof, or perhaps for religious purposes, were built into the wall separating the naos from the pronaos.

The northern colonnade with the architrave and part of the frieze is completely preserved, while the colonnades on the other three sides are only partly surviving, with four columns missing and nine severely damaged, and they almost entirely lack their architraves. Some small elements of the naos remain, mostly the foundations of its exterior walls. The building has been restored using anastylosis since the eighteenth century.