He took advantage of that very famous fire in Rome, which took place in
64 AD to, legend has it that he fiddled while Rome burned.
He wasn't fiddling, actually, but
he was participating in some sort of musical performance, we know that.
And after the fire raged through the city and
caused incredible havoc and great destruction, what Nero did was,
instead of rebuilding the land for the people of Rome,
he just expropriated 300 to 350 acres of prime real estate in downtown Rome.
And he used it to build his own villa, his own palace, in the center of Rome,
the famous Domus Aurea or Golden House because it had a gilded facade.
Nero's architecture was intimately bound up with the vicissitudes of his life and
his distinctive, if not warped, personality, as we shall see.
Nero built two palaces in Rome, and
I'd like to deal with those in consecutive order.
The first of these, as you can see from the monument list, is the so-called
Domus Transitoria, the less well-known one and less well-preserved one.
The Domus Transitoria in Rome that was built some time before the fire, before AD
64, because it was very significantly destroyed in that fire of AD 64.
I'm showing you a Google Earth image of
the part of Rome in which this building found itself.
We are looking down, we've seen this one before, we are looking down at the Roman
forum, the Coliseum in the uppermost part there, the Palatine Hill over here.
And if we follow the Roman Forum toward the Coliseum and
toward the later Arch of Constantine, we will see that there is a spur hill
over here and that spur hill is located between the Palatine Hill and
one of Rome's other hills, the Esquiline, E-S-Q-U-I-L-I-N-E, the Esquiline Hill.
Nero's dream was to link the buildings that were going up on the Palatine,
we've already talked about the imperial palace begun by Tiberius, continued
by Caligula, Claudius had no interest in that, but then Nero returns to it.
And he's continuing to build this palace on the Palatine, but
his dream is to link that with property that he also owns on the Esquiline Hill,
and to make one truly grandiose palace that links
those two hills across a spur hill called the Velia, V-E-L-I-A,
which is in this uppermost part of the Roman Forum, closest to the Coliseum.
That was his dream, and he began to try to realize it prior to 64 AD.
The building is called the Domus Transitoria because it served as
a point of transit between those two hills, between the Palatine and
the Esquiline Hills.
Again, because it was so seriously destroyed in fire and
also because it was deliberately destroyed by later emperors who
were following the damnation, the damnatio memoriae, the damnation of Nero's memory,
and felt that it was their right, in a sense, to destroy his buildings.
So those two things together, deliberate destruction plus the fire,
essentially destroyed most of the Domus Transitoria, but
a couple of sections are preserved underground.
And they're very important for us to look at,
because they give us insight into the later Golden House or Domus Aurea.
I want to show you the two sections that are still preserved in restored views
that you will find in your textbook and Ward-Perkins.
One of these is located beneath the, while this is still on the screen, if you
look at the Palatine Palace here just a little bit up beyond where my finger is,
there is the dining hall of the later first century AD palace that we'll look at
soon, next week.
You see it there.