Nero
The coliseum now stands on part of the former Golden House. Later emperors were in a hurry to erase the evidence of Nero's unwelcome extravagance.

Fresco painting almost 2,000 years old has come to light

From the BBC

A contemporary bird's-eye view of what archaeologists believe could be ancient Rome has been uncovered.

This surprising discovery was made by an Italian archaeologist, Elisabeta Carnabuci, who has been working for 15 years in the dank tunnels that honeycomb one of the hills of ancient Rome near the coliseum.

It was here that the Emperor Nero built his so-called Golden House, one of the most splendid palaces of ancient Rome, some of whose decorations have gradually come to light during the past 400 years.

Ancient Roman wall paintings influenced many famous Renaissance and Baroque painters, who copied some of the motifs, which became known to art historians as the Pompeian style.

The newly uncovered fresco measures about two metres by three and it shows an imagined aerial view of an ancient fortified city with an island on a river running through it - just like Rome.

There are statues overlooking a public square and a theatre which looks similar to the Theatre of Marcellus, parts of which have survived in the modern city.

Art experts are unsure if this unusual city scene represents an actual view of Rome or is an imaginary city, but either way it's one of the most remarkable archaeological finds to be made in the centre of Rome since the private study of the Emperor Augustus was discovered on the Palatine Hill 20 years ago.

The Golden House would still impress today

From Suetonius (c.A.D. 110), Life of Nero (Translated by J.C. Rolfe)

Nero was ruinously prodigal in building. He made a palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which at first he called the House of Passage, but when it was burned shortly after its completion and rebuilt, it became known as the Golden House.

Its size and splendor will be sufficiently indicated by the following details. Its vestibule was large enough to contain a huge statue of the emperor 120 feet high; and it was so extensive that it had a triple colonnade a mile long. There was a pond too, like a sea, surrounded with buildings to represent cities, beside tracts of country, varied by tilled fields, vineyards, pastures and woods, with great numbers of wild and domestic animals. In the rest of the house all parts were overlaid with gold and adorned with gems and mother-of-pearl. There were dining-rooms with fretted ceilings of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes.

The main banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved day and night, like the heavens. He had baths supplied with sea water and sulphur water. When the edifice was finished in this style and he dedicated it, he deigned to say nothing more in the way of approval than that he was at last beginning to be housed like a human being.

He also began a pool, extending from Misenum to the Lake of Avernus, roofed over and enclosed in colonnades, into which he planned to turn all the hot springs in every part of Baiae; a canal from Avernus all the way to Ostia, to enable the journey to be made by ship yet not by sea; its length was to be 160 miles and its breadth sufficient to allow ships with five banks of oars to pass each other. For the execution of these projects he had given orders that the prisoners all over the empire should be transported to Italy, and that those who were convicted even of capital crimes should be punished in no other way than by sentence to this work.

In A.D. 64, fourth-fifths of Rome was devastated by fire. Some blamed Nero for the catastrophe, noting that it cleared out commercial districts that separated his land holdings in the city. Whether Nero set the fire or not, it allowed him to construct the Domus Aurea, the Golden House, a palace occupying three of the fabled seven hills of Rome. A revolutionary masterpiece, the Domus Aurea marked the first use of concrete as the building material of choice for fine architecture and the break with Greek design based on solids - the walls, the columns, and the entablatures they support.

Using vaulted architecture in concrete, Nero's architects instead arranged a harmony of simple shapes--rectangular and triangular prisms, cubes, octagons, and hemi-cylinders - consisting of empty space. To decorate his new palace, Nero had the finest painter in Rome imprisoned in it. Within 60 years of its construction, however, the Golden House had been stripped bare of its fine marble, and demolished or buried by later emperors who legitimized their own rule by destroying Nero's works or made use of his buildings as the foundations for their own. Today, the Esquiline Wing of the Golden House is virtually all that remains. Closed to the public in the early 1980s because of its deteriorating condition, it is once again open to visitors. Much money has been spent on restoration.

The Golden House was so huge that the part now covered by the coliseum was only the lake.

The area of the property was 985 feet long by 295 feet in width or depth. Among the other things there was an amphitheatre, a market, and bath-gymnasium complex, served by an aqueduct 50 miles long. There were hundreds of statues, grottoes, nymphaeums, porticoes painted with romantic landscapes; multiple waterfalls flowed everywhere. The lake - where the coliseum now stands - was surrounded by woods and fake sea villages, and it was so big that ships could manoeuvre in it. One of the most famous of these rooms featured a circular roof painted with the stars and the planets, that revolved mechanically imitating the movement of the stars.

After the death of Nero, Vespasian re-opened the property to the public, and the palace of Nero was accordingly covered by the southern part of the baths of Titus and Trajan. Enormous foundations were placed in the palace of Nero to support the new building, and this also helped to preserve what remained of the Domus. The ruins have been visited since the 15th Century, and its paintings have been an inspiration for many artists (i.e. Raphael in his decoration of the Logge Vaticane) who have left their graffiti on the walls. The Domus Aurea was then called "le grotte", and this seems to be the origin of the term "grottesco" (grotesque).

It is said the Golden House was so large that Nero never actually visited every single room in it. It may not look very impressive from these pictures, but the Golden House could very well have been one of the most impressive building projects of the time. This was the first time the dome was use in Roman architecture (see photo above) and became widely used in other great buildings such as Hadrian's Parthenon. The base for the dome of Nero's Golden house was an eight sided, or octagonal shaped room. The dome begins in the shape of an octagon and takes on a smooth dome shape as it rises.