Villa di Domiziano al Circeo

History

The earliest villa here was built in the late-Republican and Augustan eras. It is likely that it was the villa of the Triumvir Lepidus to which he was exiled in 36 BC in the 2nd Triumvirate until his death, after a dispute with Octavian.

The villa was greatly expanded and enhanced by Domitian (r. 81-96 AD). It was one of his numerous villas in Italy including those at Castel Gandolfo, Tusculum, Antium, Caieta, Anxur, Vicarello and Baiae.

Domitian conducted state business here, as at Rome and at his Alban villa, as shown be the Lex Irnitana from Spain which has the words recitatae Circeiis (dictated at Circeii) added by Domitian and dated October 91. Martial refers to the villa as the place where mistresses were summoned by Domitian.

The first recorded excavations were by Cardinal Collicola between 1720 and 1728 under pope Innocent XIII (1721–1724). The policy of the Barberini family was to build at the expense of ancient monuments by robbing their building material to build the docks of the canal and other buildings. An army of convicts was used to knock down walls and prepare building material, while porters transported them to the work site at lake Paola. Even marble was removed from floors. This systematic destruction took place not only in the Villa of Domitian, but also in the area of the port-canal of Circeii, on the Via Severiana, where almost all the tombs were razed to the ground, and in the villas around the present Casarini ruins. The most valuable objects, meanwhile, were sold to the noble villas of Rome and to the Vatican. They then ended up on the antiques market of the time and marbles and statues were divided into many museums, among which was the important statue of the so-called Apollo Kassel (now in a Kassel museum) after passing through the Conti collection and bought in 1777 by Landgraf Friedrich II. Another mission by the Papal States in 1798 undertaken by Petrini had the aim of looting works of art for profit and led to the discovery of about 29 statues including the Vatican Faun. …

The site

Aerial photographs show that the area was densely built-up. Today, due to dumps of earth from early excavations and the extensive planting of pine trees in the 1940s which are endangering the surviving ruins of the villa underground with their roots and on the surface, only three parts of the villa are visible:

the area of the “Exedra baths”, situated along the south-western side of the peninsula,

the area of the so-called “apsidal basin” at the north-western tip

the central zone with cisterns for collection and distribution of water.

The baths building has an imposing façade along the western shore of the peninsula with grandiose quays, interrupted only by two porticoed exedras near the thermal baths. The baths is a series of intercommunicating rooms, joined by two corridors, in the typical calidarium-tepidarium-frigidarium arrangement to form a compact block with all the other rooms, including a vast rectangular gymnasium, the perimeter of which is defined by a portico covered in marble opus spicatum. The corridor at the NW corner of the palaestra leads to a stairway, allowing access from the NW to the exedras and, immediately to the south, through another stairway, to the baths. A porticoed passage linked the front of the baths on the lake with the exedras. The latter consisted of three rooms with a semicircular plan, two of which faced the lake.

To the north of the peninsula is the area of the apsidal basin below which most of the late-republican villa’s structures are located. Here, Domitian's architects showed their supreme ingenuity by integrating the earlier monumental structures into the new sumptuous palace.

It included a peristyle garden whose colonnaded facade overlooked the lake. It was decorated with frescoes and monochrome white floor mosaics with black borders, behind the north-eastern part of the portico bordering the late Republican fish pond. …