This first section is a brief explanation of my Italy blog posts, which were inspired by my 2-week trip to Italy in May, 2025. Feel free to skip this section if you’ve read it before.
Dear Reader, If you read my Italy posts in the order in which they’ve come out, it may seem as though we hopped back and forth all over the country, but I have decided not to write these posts sequentially. I want to write about the things that interest me most, as the spirit moves me. For some topics, I may even combine cities. I hope that by doing so, you’ll find it a lot more interesting than if I just give you a tedious day by day description of our itinerary, as if I were your Aunt Mabel forcing you to sit down and watch all her Super 8 films of the family road trip to Niagara Falls from 1966.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about how I’m approaching this travelogue-within-a-blog, please let me know in the comments below!
I would like to invite you, Dear Reader, to take a journey with me in a time machine of my own invention. Our destination is Rome, sometime in the late 1490’s. We are having wine with my dear friend Michelangelo, who is in his early 20’s, and has not been living in the city for very long. He’s in the midst of a 3 year stay, in which he will work on two sculptures: Bacchus, which I find to be kind of creepy (sorry, my friend), and the Pietà, which will come to be regarded as one of the world’s great masterpieces of sculpture (and I wholeheartedly agree).
As we are just visiting, he decides to show us one of the most amazing things in all of Rome, if we are brave enough, and as long as we don’t mind getting our strange clothes dirty. “No,” I think. “Michelangelo did not just double dog dare me. Not after I’ve traveled more than 500 years…”
When we press for more details, He tells us that no one is really sure what it is, exactly. There’s a possibility that it’s earlier parts of the Trajan Baths, whose later ruins are above it, but whatever it is, the art is exquisite. He assures us that we’ve never seen anything quite like it. I smile quietly to myself, as I find this ironic, coming from Michelangelo.
As we walk toward the Esquiline Hill, he tells us that the place was discovered quite by accident. A boy was walking along one afternoon, and suddenly the ground gave way and he fell through a cleft, and found himself in this cave, surrounded by art. Word got around quickly, and now artists visit all the time, sometimes bringing their lunch and spending the whole day sketching, in order to get some inspiration from the art of ancient Rome. (It’s funny to think of it, but ancient Rome was already considered ancient in Medieval times.)
It is getting dark, and indeed, as we approach the aforementioned cleft, there are some men standing nearby, and we can see the glow of many torches down below. We aren’t going to be alone. The men offer to winch us down on boards attached to long ropes, for a small fee. It doesn’t look particularly safe, but Michelangelo goes first, having done this dozens of times. Soon our curiosity gets the better of us, and down we go as well.
Just as we set foot on the uneven rubble and dirt, we hear men greeting Michelangelo. Many of the prominent Renaissance artists of the day are there: Pinturicchio, Raphael, Ghirlandaio, Lippi, Romano, Perugino, and Udine. Several of them have scratched their names into the frescoes. (Casanova and the Marquis de Sade will leave their signatures in the walls, too, eventually, but that won’t be until the 1700’s, so I don’t say anything.)
Michelangelo is impressed by the progress that has been made since he was down here a week ago. The roof is arched, so everyone assumes that the rooms are full of dirt and that we are standing up by the ceiling (where it is possible to stand, that is. Mostly, we have to crawl), and some more dirt has been dug away to reveal some of the more intriguing designs that had been only partially exposed before. Also, more rooms have been accessed by boring through some of the walls up by the ceiling, so before we know what’s happening, Michelangelo crawls through to see those rooms, and we can hear him exclaiming with delight at the colorful work.
We hear him calling to us, and as we crawl past other artists, their noses pressed into the corners, copying design elements, I long to tell them all that we have discovered about this place in the future.
Oh, blast. Now I’ve done it.
Unfortunately, there’s a glitch in this time machine of mine that I haven’t been able to fix. The minute I think of the word “future”, it sucks us right back into the present. And we didn’t even get to say goodbye. What a pity.
Well, I’m sure Michelangelo will see a lot of unexplainable things in his lifetime, so he’ll survive our disappearance. And actually, this is kind of convenient, because now I can tell you, dear readers, exactly where we were. And it wasn’t Trajan’s Baths, although those are, in fact, directly above this amazing place.
No. What that boy fell into on that fateful day was the Pavilion of the Domus Aurea, or the Golden House, which was commissioned by Nero, great-great-grandson of Caesar Augustus. Nero was the last emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. It could even be argued that the Golden House was one of the final straws on the camel’s back of insane excesses by Nero that led to the Roman legion’s revolt against him. With that revolt, and the fact that the senate had declared him a public enemy, Nero saw the writing on the wall and committed suicide in AD 68.
There are plenty of places where you can get the gory details about Nero. But in broad strokes I will say that he was 16 when he first became emperor, and he only ruled for 14 years. He had to grow up fast (and some would say he never did) and he had little or no guidance. For the first five years he was under the thumb of his mother Agrippina, who appears to have been all about ambition, power, and control, so it’s safe to say he didn’t have the most stable, mature foundation to draw upon. And yet, he made some sound fiscal decisions for Rome, at first, and allowed slaves to file complaints about their masters for the first time. He also promoted a successful expedition of the Nile River.
But then he killed his mother in AD 59, and it is reported that at that point he lost all sense of right and wrong. When the public did not like the fact that he divorced his first wife, he accused her of adultery and had her executed. He may or may not have kicked his second wife to death while she was pregnant, or she may simply have died in childbirth. He then took a third wife, but apparently never got over the death of wife number two, because despite still being married to wife three, he also married a young man who bore a striking resemblance to wife two. He had him castrated, and often presented the young man at court in full empress regalia as his wife.
And then there is the whole “fiddling while Rome burned” rumor. There was, indeed, a devastating fire in AD 64. It is believed that the fire started either in the stands of the Circus Maximus or in one of the shops on the Aventine Hill that overlooked the Circus. Rome had always been vulnerable to fires, with its wooden structures and narrow streets, but this one was a doozy. The fire burned for a total of 10 days.
Given Nero’s horrible reputation among the senate and the upper classes, it is not surprising that even then, rumors started to fly that the fire was Nero’s fault. Of course it is their writings, not those of the common people, that have come down to us. But oddly enough, Tacitus, who was normally no friend to Nero, defended him.
Before I tell you what Tacitus said, I ought to mention that there were no fiddles in Rome at the time (and I suspect that there have not been many since—fiddles and violins are not equivalent). Nero was skilled at playing the cithara, which is a type of lyre. Regardless, according to Tacitus, Nero was not even in town when the fire started. He was in Antium, about 38 miles south, about where the city of Anzio is located today.
As soon as Nero heard news of the fire, he returned to Rome, organized the relief effort, and paid, out of his own funds, for the removal of bodies and debris. He also turned his palaces into homeless shelters and had food supplies delivered to prevent starvation. That does not sound like a callous fiddler to me.
But when all is said and done, Nero is still Nero. When the rumors that the fire was his fault became too overwhelming for him, what did he do? According to Tacitus, he blamed it on the Christians. This resulted in those martyrs being brutally tortured and executed.
And yes, Nero did take advantage of all the newly cleared real estate to build his Domus Aurea. This huge complex stretched between the Palatine Hill and the Esquiline Hill, and took up a great deal of the valley in between. Only a tiny portion of the complex has been excavated, so we cannot be certain of its size. Some say it took up a square mile, which would be 640 acres, others say it was 300 acres, while still others say it was “only” 100 acres of prime land in the center of Rome. Whatever its size, it was the source of some resentment, because it was private, not public, even though it had been built with public funds, and the word opulent is not opulent enough for these structures and the accompanying landscape.
Setting aside the 116-foot-tall statue of Nero as the sun god, and the man-made lake with its own aqueduct, let’s focus on the pavilion, because that, Dear Reader, is what Michelangelo showed us. Nero commissioned two architects, Severus and Celer, to build the Pavilion. It had 300 rooms, and very few of them were bedrooms. This building was not intended to be a home. It was meant to be a place where Nero could throw legendary, and sometimes fatal, parties.
No two rooms were alike, but all of them, even the hallways, with their slanted windows, were designed to take full advantage of the light. The lower half of the rooms were encased in white marble. The décor made use of an extreme amount of gold leaf. (Apparently that’s all the rage for cruel despots.) There were gorgeous frescoes on the upper walls (which we’ll discuss more below), and many of the ceilings were encrusted with semi-precious stones.
The most noteworthy room is now called the Octagonal Room, and it was most likely used for dining. It had an oculus at the top of the dome that would shine light down in the center, apparently to illuminate Nero as a god. It looked out over a sort of racetrack where young men would compete, most likely naked, and in the distance you could see the lake. But the most fascinating thing about this room was that the dome itself rotated like the heavens. The stone of the dome ran along the stone of the walls like a millstone. It was powered by slaves, and perfume and rose petals would drop down upon the diners. It must have been a sight to see, but I’m sure it would have been overshadowed by tension, as Nero had demonstrated that he could have anyone brutally killed on a whim at any point during the festivities.
After Nero’s fall from grace and his suicide, the Domus Aurea was considered a source of shame by the people in power. They used the buildings sporadically at first. All statues of Nero were either destroyed or altered to look like someone else. None of the political elite wanted to remember that Nero ever existed.
Ironically, the common people seemed to miss him. He did add to the arts and culture of the city, which increased their access to entertainment. Many of the Roman people seemed to think he either hadn’t died, or had died but would be resurrected and be emperor yet again. Several impostors came forward and fooled people for a time, but were then executed. So Nero’s legacy is complicated. It would depend on whom you asked.
Over the next 40 years, the buildings of the Domus Aurea were picked apart. You can find its marble in churches and buildings throughout Rome. All the semi-precious stones disappeared. The lake was filled in and the Colosseum was built on top of it. Eventually, the emperor Trajan decided to build public baths over the top of much of the pavilion. The debris created was bulldozed into it, and that became the foundation for the baths.
So, in the end, the land was returned to the people. The Domus Aurea was forgotten. And then a young man stumbled upon (or rather, into) it in the late 1400’s, and that’s where this blog post began. Even though its existence was known from then on, the pavilion was not properly excavated until the 18th century.
Today, 155 of its 300 rooms have been excavated, and it is still an active archeological site, but much of the rest of it will be forever buried unless technology drastically changes, because removing more of the fill dirt now would cause many of the walls and ceilings to collapse. You can go on a guided tour of the Domus Aurea on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, only. The rest of the week it is the realm of the archeologists.
If Nero were to come back today, he definitely would not recognize the place. This pavilion, which was made to shine in the sunlight, for the most part will never see the sun again. Once a bright palatial mansion on a hill, it is now a dark cavernous underground ruin that most people overlook. It would be extremely creepy if you ever found yourself there during a power outage. To give you a better sense of the vast lightlessness of the place now, here’s a short compilation of multiple video clips, in no particular order, that Dear Husband took during our tour.
It was really exciting to get to tour the place. Our guide, Sara, was extremely informative, and the tour was set up really well. There was an introduction video that showed us, among other things, the overall floor plan of the place. In many of the rooms they had a lit up display that highlighted some of the more intricate artistic features, or virtual images of what the rooms used to look like. There were also a few sculptures on display that had been found on the site.
Unlike in Michelangelo’s time, the ceilings were so high above us that it made me feel dwarfed by comparison. I’m sure that was intentional. Nero probably enjoyed making people feel insignificant. You could still see the holes where the artists used to crawl in. Unfortunately, those same holes let in humidity, which caused the deterioration of some of the artwork, so what’s left will need to be restored if we don’t want it to be forever lost.
The octagonal room was pretty amazing. It was hard to imagine the dome rotating, but it wouldn’t be the only time the Romans pulled off a miracle of construction. And the thought that we were standing in the very room where Nero used to stand gave me the shivers.
The best part of the tour, though, was the virtual reality part. It allowed us to see what the place must have really looked like, and it felt like we were actually walking through the place in its heyday. It added to my understanding, too, because as much as our guide tried to describe it to us, it was very hard to imagine a bright white, open and airy room when we were in a cavernous pit of blackness.
I would be remiss if I didn’t talk a bit more about how the art of the Domus Aurea influenced Renaissance art. You have to remember that all those influential artists that I mentioned above were crawling around the Domus Aurea centuries before Pompeii, Herculaneum, and other sites with this type of Roman art were rediscovered. None of them had ever seen anything like it before.
The artist that created the work in the Domus Aurea was probably the most renowned of his day. His name was Famulus. According to Pliny the Elder (who died while attempting to rescue people during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79, which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum), Famulus only worked a few hours a day when the light was just right.
As the closeup of Famulus’ style above indicates, he was known for bands of frieze, delicate swags, and framed areas containing figures or landscapes. This influenced the work of Raphael, as you can see here:
And ever-so-subtly, here and there, you see his influence in Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel:
And it’s even in the corridors of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence:
I can understand the instinct to want to wipe Nero from history. But even the most unappetizing history has something to offer us. And in the case of the Domus Aurea, its offerings have been profound. Go see it if you can.
Additional Sources:
Nero’s Golden House: How to Visit the Domus Aurea in Rome
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