|
The Temple of Venus in Baia
A glimpse
of the view that the ancient Romans had from the sea
off of Baia is still preserved on glass vases, which
offer a schematic reproduction of the buildings, domes
and the port, indicating them with the words: Stagnum – Palatium – Ostriaria – Ripa - Pilae (pond
– palace - oyster beds – shore – rocks) as well as the
phrase Anima felix
vivas (live happily). Indeed, they did
just that, and the waters and shore of Baia even today
present ample evidence: thermal baths, great palaces,
etc. —everything to satisfy the imperial tastes of the
“beautiful people” of the Roman empire in the first
century AD. (And this is not to mention the great amphitheater of Pozzuoli
(for real fun and games), just a short chariot ride
away.
[Other entries dealing with Baia and the
immediate environs:
The Baia Castle and Museum;
The Imperial Port of Baia;
Miseno; The Sireno Aqueduct;
The Phlegrean Fields;
Cuma]
 One
of the most interesting bits of architecture in the
vast outdoor (and underwater!) museum that is Baia is
the so-called Temple of Venus (photo, right) . It is
directly adjacent on the west to the entrance to the
small lovely port of modern Baia. The structure was
built in the reign of Hadrian (117-137 AD). It offers
striking evidence of the evolution that took place in
Roman architecture during the Julio-Caludian period.
There is a clear difference between this building,
characterized by a high tambour (the circular vertical
part of the cupola) with a circular internal plan and
external octagonal one with large windows, and the
elementary structure of other, earlier buildings in
the area. The use of opus cementicium as the main binding
ingredient had reached perfection; this is a mixture
of stone chips and strong mortar that contained pozzolana (a
volcanic ash named for the town of Pozzuoli).
This newer technology as well as an increasingly
specialized workforce led to the construction of
buildings where space was conceived of in a different
and very modern way; mixtilinear (combing both
straight and curved lines) forms of architecture
started to become more widespread and were marked by
bright spaces designed to be aesthetic and pleasing to
the eye and not merely lived in.
This Temple of Venus is “so-called” because it was
really something else (as is the case with a number of
other “temples” in the area—the
Temple of Serapis in
Pozzuoli, for example). In this
case excavation has shown the structure to have been a
thermal bath, the baths of which reach down to about
six meters below today’s visible ground level. The
outer face is in brick, with large porticos of reticulatum;
inside, the walls were dressed with slabs of marble up
to the impost of the windows and higher up with
mosaic. The outside still shows traces of the original
stone facing. The dome was formed by an umbrella
vault; a part of the octagonal roof remains visible
from the outside.
The lower part of the building, on which other only
partially visible buildings lean, has become difficult
to interpret; this is due not just to the lowering of
the ground level caused by seismic activity, but also
due to the restoration designed to reinforce the
structure at the beginning of the 20th century. The
thermal baths were connected to a structure in the
rear and stretched along the slope of the hill.
to encyclopedia index
to
archaeology portal
|
