Southern sector of the Villa of Domitian, occupied by a large bathing building with an adjoining bath complex arranged around a quadriporticus with a fine floor of polychrome marble pieces (from pink to yellow) laid in a herringbone pattern. Inside the quadriporticus is a large open-air gymnasium, once paved with mosaic. The emperor Domitian’s architects skilfully integrated the monumental structures of an earlier complex into this sector, creating one of the most sumptuous imperial residences on the Lazio coast, today an Archaeological Park managed by the Regional Directorate of Museums of Lazio.
The Villa of Domitian is one of the most evocative places in the Agro Pontino, chosen by the last emperor of the Flavian dynasty as one of his summer residences. It occupies a peninsula jutting into Lake Paola and lies within the Circeo National Park, in a strict nature reserve area, the Ruins of Circe. Even then it must have had a special charm, an ideal locus amoenus, favoured both for the rich economic resources of the area and for the landscape. This is the land of Circe, daughter of the Sun and of an Ocean nymph, setting of some of the adventures of Ulysses, a hero dear to the Romans.
The vast residential complex has a complex building history, and the latest excavation campaigns have identified at least five different construction phases. The phase dating to the emperor Domitian, the last, involved a grand project to rearrange and redevelop the buildings of earlier periods. The result was a true urbs, economically self-sufficient and permanently inhabited by an entourage that kept it running.
The grand project was carried out on the one hand by turning all the existing rooms and structures suitable for monumental reuse into a coherent and functional whole, and on the other by demolishing the buildings considered obsolete. Domitian conceived the villa maritima on the shores of Lake Paola as a place of pleasurable stays for cultured and refined people, who came here to spend their otia: hours of rest and contemplation, moments of study and learned conversation, not to mention healthy physical exercise.
This is the context of the south-western wing of the Palace, where the archaeological walk through the emperor’s residence begins. On entering, you face the buildings of the so-called pars urbana, the representative part of the villa, with the rooms intended for receiving and entertaining the imperial family and their guests: the Baths, the Quadriporticus and the Gymnasium, the elegant Bathing Building with Exedrae, and the Forica or public latrines.
The Baths consist of a series of small rooms: the laconicum, today’s sauna, the hottest room with steam reaching almost 60°; the caldarium, the room with hot-water pools; the tepidarium, a room with mild heat; and finally the frigidarium, with ice-cold basins.
Bathing involved moving from the sauna to the hot bath, then to the moderately warm room, ending with a plunge into the cold-water basin. This play of temperatures, after abundant sweating, ensured the elimination of toxins and reactivated blood circulation.
The different temperatures were produced by jets of heat running under the floors, raised on small brick blocks, the suspensurae. The baths were run by specialised slaves, the fornacarii, who tended the underground furnaces located in the tunnels below. From the furnaces the heat spread through small channels under the floors of the rooms above.
At the Villa of Domitian, where the upper walls have collapsed, the underground tunnels have come to light: cramped and narrow, where the fornacarii worked in terrible conditions, enduring the extremely high temperatures of the furnaces. The otium of the nobles was thus ensured by the exploitation of slaves.
Connected to the baths was the open-air gymnasium, paved with a mosaic of tiny black and white tesserae and surrounded on four sides by a portico, of which the beautiful floor in opus spicatum made with pieces of Chian marble survives. All these spaces were enhanced by a rich decorative scheme, now largely lost: opus sectile floors, mosaic decoration on the walls and in the basins, and stucco ceilings.
