Marina De Franceschini
«Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli. The mosaic ceiling of the republican cryptoporticus»
Rivista internazionale di studi miscellanei sulla villa romana antica, XII 2023, pp. 73-99.
The Cryptoporticus with Mosaic Vault belonged to an ancient villa of the Republican age which was enclosed by the Hadrianic buildings of the Imperial Palace of Villa Adriana. Originally it was a basis villae, with four cryptoporticoes illuminated by window-tunnels. In one of them, the mosaic ceiling has been miraculously preserved; it is on of the oldest and complete examples still in situ.
The mosaic ceiling has been tudied the past, but in 2022 the author of this article was able to explore the site, which had been closed to the public for twenty years.
She took new photographs and, by comparing the remainswith the drawings by Lugli and Lavagne, it was possible to reconstruct the patterns of the decoration.
On this occasion, she identified and photographed several signatures of scholars and antiquarians who explored the Cryptoporticus in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which were thought to have disappeared.