The Hospitalia have a large central corridor, along which ten cubicles (bedrooms) open: each one has three rectangular niches where the beds were placed. Their black and white mosaic floors are a great sampling of different designs, one more beautiful than the other.
The central square of the cubicle pavement has the most beautiful and complex decoration, with stylized vegetal motifs and arabesques typical of the Hadrianic era.
They have unique designs, "custom made" for the emperor, an incredible repertoire with four-leaf clovers, rosettes, bucrania, palmettes, vases.
The pavement of the rectangular niches was partly hidden by the beds and therefore had simpler designs: rectangles, squares, circles or triangles in various combinations.
At the end of the central corridor of the Hospitalia
there is a large room with a base for a statue, which probably was a shrine. The mosaic pavement has interlocking circles forming hexagons. When the mosaic was removed for restoration in the 1960s, the sinopia, that is the preparatory drawing which guided the mosaicists in their work, was found under it.
The mosaics are very beautiful but they were certainly not as precious as the small polychrome mosaic panels that were found in the noble buildings of the Villa, reserved for the emperor and his court, which also had opus sectile floors of precious marbles. They are panels with very small tesserae of a few millimeters, like the
famous Mosaic of the Doves found in the Accademia or others with scenic masks found in the Imperial Palace,
The mosaics of the Hospitalia are black and white, with larger tesserae and therefore they were less precious and expensive; at Villa Adriana they are used in the secondary buildings such as the Hospitalia and the Imperial Triclinium, where high-ranking personnel lived, probably the Praetorians or imperial officers.
©Marina De Franceschini - Progetto Accademia