The Accademia of Villa Adriana is privately owned was never opened to the public. The most important room is the Temple of Apollo: an imposing circular Hall of 13m in diameter, once covered by a dome. Only half of the building is still standing, the rest collapsed long time ago, probably in late antiquity.
The lower floor is divided into twenty panels: doors open in eight of them, the others are framed by half-columns made of bricks. The walls were revetted with painted plaster. Only twelve panels are still visible. It was
astronomically oriented as we discovered in 2009 and
explain in our book «Villa Adriana. Architettura Celeste. I segreti dei Solstizi».Also upper floor of the Temple of Apollo was divided into twenty sectors, with ten windows alternating with niches for statues, but only a total of ten is left. In the sixteenth century the great artist and antiquarian
Pirro Ligorio thought that the number ten corresponded to the nine Muses plus Apollo, and called it "Temple of Apollo and the Muses", a name that we still use today.
In the room that opens onto the main axis, the famous
Mosaic of the Doves was found by Monsignor Giuseppe Alessandro Furietti, in 1736. It is one of
the masterpieces of mosaic art of all times, now in the Capitoline Museums in Rome.
The Temple of Apollo opens onto the rectangular portico of the Accademia with a monumental entrance, in which the surveys of Professor Friedrich Rakob in the 1990's found
remains of polychrome mosaics with triangles, meanders and perspective parallelepipeds. They were reused in the Eighteenth century
to make table tops, which vere rediscovered by Marina De Franceschini in the Palazzo Taverna at Rome.