Domus Aurea

Historic · Rione Monti (Colle Oppio park, Viale della Domus Aurea)Rome,Italy

The buried basement of the palace Nero laid across central Rome, packed with rubble by the emperors who followed and entered now in hard hats.

The Domus Aurea is the surviving basement of the palace Nero laid across the middle of Rome after the fire of 64 AD, and it lies underground because later emperors deliberately buried it. He took the burnt ground for himself: courtyards, an artificial lake where the Colosseum now stands, and rooms faced in marble and painted from floor to vault. He was dead within four years, and the emperors who followed set about erasing him. They drained the lake, packed his halls with earth and rubble, and built public baths on top. You see it today as a cellar. A guide takes small groups down under a public park in hard hats, along brick corridors where the air stays at about ten degrees Celsius. The route ends in an octagonal room whose concrete dome has a round opening in the middle, and the rooms around it are lit only through that hole. Damp is the constant problem here, so a lightweight garden was built over the site to cut the water coming through, replacing three tonnes of soil per square metre with less than one. Sections still close without warning while the work goes on.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Dress for ten degrees whatever the month is — the temperature underground barely moves across the year, and people arrive from a Roman August in shirtsleeves and spend ninety minutes shivering.
Book weeks ahead, because tours run only at weekends and fill up early — entry is by guided tour only, and the ground underfoot is uneven brick with no step-free route.
Follow the guide's lamp when you look at the vaults — the surviving paint is thin and pale, and a beam angled across the plaster brings out figures that you cannot see under flat light.
Look for the joins where later walls cut Nero's rooms in half — the brickwork that blocks doorways and thickens corners belongs to the baths built on top a generation afterwards.

Things to do

1
Stand under the round opening in the octagon's dome
The route ends in the eight-sided hall. Put yourself in the middle, look up at the round opening in the concrete, and then watch how the light behaves. It drops in one shaft, hits the floor, and only then finds its way into the five rooms opening off the sides.
2
Find the signatures the painters left
On some of the vaults, names are scratched into the plaster in fifteenth and sixteenth-century hands. Ask the guide where they are and get close: these are the marks of the men who came down on ropes with torches and went home to paint the ceilings of half of Italy.
3
Come up into the park and look back
The visit ends in Colle Oppio, an ordinary city park with dog walkers and benches. Turn round at the top and look at the ground. The low grass mounds and the brick stubs sticking out of them are the baths that were built on top of the palace you have just walked through, burying it.