More than any other monument built by Hadrian, Hadrian's Villa defies classification and remains unique in its size, complexity, and variety of architecture and decoration. It is the peak of Roman architecture from the early Empire, and the starting point for all subsequent architecture, up to the Late Empire and the Renaissance, with countless imitations.
It is the largest and most complex imperial Roman villa that came down to us and was an otium villa, intended for vacation and leisure but also for study and meditation. Roman aristocrats built them as early as the Republican era as suburban villas, a few miles from the most important cities. They immediately became a status symbol where the owner displayed his wealth, culture, and his love of the arts and beauty.
In the Imperial age, starting with Augustus, leisure villas (ville di Otium) became increasingly larger and more complex, and began to be built in other regions, favoring the Tyrrhenian coast and particularly beautiful locations that remain unchanged to this day.
Tiberius built the Villa Jovis in Capri and another villa at Sperlonga with its Grotto. Nero built a villa at Subiaco with an artificial lake and another at Anzio, but the largest was his Domus Aurea, a villa that he implanted into the heart of Rome, occupying an immense area. There, avant-garde experimentation in monumental and scenographic architecture took place, with complex shapes of rooms and large terraces. Domitian's villa on Lake Albano was equally vast, luxurious, and innovative, with at least five different levels, cryptoporticoes, baths, and theaters.
Hadrian's Villa represents the top of this journey. It was the birthplace of a new, curvilinear architecture that prefigured the Baroque, with its array of rooms, unexpected perspectives, internal gardens, luxurious decorations, precious marbles, and hundreds of statues. Emperors and nobles after Hadrian would draw inspiration from it, creating imitations like the villa in Piazza Armerina, but were never able to surpass it. The great Renaissance and Baroque artists would also attempt to do so, but comparisons with the palaces of Windsor, Caserta, or Versailles are both unrealistic and reductive.
Some buildings of Hadrian's Villa are immortal architectural icons of all time. Take the Maritime Theater, which was actually a miniature villa within the great imperial estate, decorated with friezes depicting sea monsters that gave it its name.
Or the Canopus, a grandiose and spectacular summer triclinium designed to host illustrious guests, with a basin along which Hadrian arranged copies of the Caryatids from the Erechtheion in Athens.
There were baths, residential buildings, some of which were heated in winter, while others had waterfalls to mitigate the summer heat; theaters, internal gardens, porticoes, and tricliniums.
The Villa had everything necessary for the life of the emperor, his court, high-ranking personnel, and slaves, each with separate buildings and routes, following a precise hierarchy.
And then there was a sacred area, which Marina De Franceschini identified as the Accademia Esplanade with the Accademia and Roccabruna buildings, thanks to the illuminations she discovered during her archaeoastronomy studies.
The Accademia Esplanade was the true Acropolis of the Villa, the highest and most isolated one, closer to the deity.
On the days of the Summer and Winter solstices, magic illuminations (hierophanies) can still be observed in both buildings.
They had a very specific symbolic meaning, which is explained in the book «Villa Adriana. Architettura Celeste. I segreti dei Solstizi» published by Rirella Editrice, in Italian language only. With unpublished images of the Accademia, which is still privately owned.