Between the years AD 64 and 68, the Roman Emperor Nero constructed a huge personal estate that sprawled across Rome’s city center. His construction campaign followed the Great Fire of 64, a catastrophic fire that burned a huge portion of Rome. Called the Domus Aurea or the Golden House of Nero, the estate covered the Palatine, Caelian and Oppian Hills, extending through the valley of the Colosseum. The famous amphitheater had not yet been constructed, so in that valley, Nero dug an artificial lake around which the buildings on his estate were artfully arranged. The Roman historian Suetonius, writing half a century or so after Nero describes the Domus Aurea in this way:
In no one thing was he more prodigal than in his buildings. He completed his palace by continuing it from the Palatine to the Esquiline hill, and called it first only ‘The Passage’ [or Domus Transitorium], but, after it was burnt down and rebuilt, ‘The Golden House’. Of its dimensions and furniture, it may be sufficient to say this much: the porch was so high that there stood in it a colossal statue of himself a hundred and twenty feet in height; and the space included in it was so ample, that it had triple porticoes a mile in length, and a lake like a sea, surrounded with buildings which had the appearance of a city. Within its area were cornfields, vineyards, pastures, and woods, containing a vast number of animals of various kinds, both wild and tame. In other parts it was entirely overlaid with gold and adorned with jewels and mother-of-pearl. The supper rooms were vaulted, and compartments of the ceilings, inlaid with ivory, were made to revolve, and scatter flowers; while a device of pipes sprinkled sweet oils upon the guests. But of all these rooms, the principal banquet chamber was the finest, being made circular, and revolving perpetually, both night and day, in the manner of the celestial bodies…Upon the dedication of this stupendous edifice, all he said in approval of it was, that he had now a dwelling fit for a man.
It is that “principal banquet chamber,” said to be circular and said to revolve both day and night like the heavens that has interested both scholars and the general public. In the past, that chamber has been understood to be (perhaps) the domed Octagonal Room (see above) in the dining wing of the Domus Aurea that remains on the Oppian Hill.
Yesterday, however, archaeologists announced a stunning new discovery on the Palatine hill, on its east corner and slopes, in the area of the Vigna Barberini or Barberini Vineyards (site pictured below). Preliminary excavations on the site, directed by Mariantoinetta Tomei and undertaken by a team coordinated by Francoise Villedieu, have unearthed a circular structures unequaled in Roman architecture.
At present only partially excavated, the structure is part of a much more extensive complex, probably a pavilion of the Domus Aurea that has remained unknown up to this time. So far, only foundations have been uncovered, but beneath them was found a rotating mechanism and part of an adjacent space that may have been used as kitchens.
“This cannot be compared to anything that we know of in ancient Roman architecture,” Villedieu told reporters during a tour.
If, indeed, this is the revolving dining room of which Suetonius speaks, it had a diameter of over 50 feet, rested upon a 13-foot wide pillar, and was furnished with four spherical mechanisms that likely powered by a constant flow of water that would have rotated the structure.
Angelo Bottini, the state’s top official for archaeology in Rome, reminded visitors that the ceiling of the rotating room mentioned by Suetonius also had ivory panels that slid back and forth to shower flowers and perfumes on the guests below.
