Since the time of Augustus, Roman emperors and aristocrats of the most important Roman and Italian families built the so-called otium villas (leisure villas), grandiose mansions intended for holidays and relaxation, built outside the cities in locations that are still beautiful and prestigious today.
The places they chose reflected the tastes and preferences of the emperors who built them. Some preferred the sea, like Tiberius who had a villa in Sperlonga and twelve villas in Capri; or Domitian, who built a villa near the Circeo, now Sabaudia.
Other emperors chose countryside locations, with spectacular landscapes and waterfalls: Nero in Subiaco, Domitian in Castelgandolfo, Trajan in Arcinazzo and of course Hadrian in Tivoli.
Augustus started this fashion, which indeed had precedents in the Republican era. The villas were not the «second homes» of today, but grandiose estates, where the emperors received important guests, dazzling them with the richness and refinement of their homes. That was just one of the many manifestations of their power and of the power of Rome.
Augustus chose a place not far from Rome, Prima Porta, where there was the villa called Ad Gallinas Albas (Villa of the white hens), which belonged to his wife Livia Drusilla; there his famous statue in white marble was found, more than two meters high, which depicts Augustus with a splendid armor, called "Augustus of Prima Porta".
Livia's Villa had an exceptional subterranean triclinium with magnificent frescoes depicting a garden. They were discovered in the 19th century and survived the bombings of the Second World War; in 1951 they were detached and taken to the National Roman Museum in Rome. Today they have been reassembled in a special room of the Museum of Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, also in Rome.
(In the black & white picture below the frescoes still onsite before detachment).
The Triclinium was a large rectangular subterranean hall, 12 x 6 meters
(that is, 40 x 20 Roman feet), covered by a low barrel vault. On the
short sides it had two lunettes from which the light entered; being
subterranean it was very cool in the summer and sheltered in winter.
The choice to build a subterranean hall was also due to structural reasons:
in the Augustan era it was feared that the walls could not support the
weight and thrust of a concrete vault of that size. Therefore it was
preferred to build a subterranean hall, so that the embankment all
around the walls served as a buttress.
Naturally it was necessary to protect the hall and its frescoes from humidity. An insulating cavity was created using the so-called tegulae mammatae, large bricks with four protruding feet (similar to breasts, hence the name), which isolated the plaster of the wall from the perimeter wall and the embankment.
Being subterranean, the triclinium could simulate a grotto, and in fact in the upper part of the frescoes are painted fake stalactites (see picture on top). That ‘virtual’ grotto opened onto an equally ‘virtual’ panorama: magnificent frescoes depicting a garden, one of the oldest attestations of painting of that kind, which will also be very popular in Pompeii.
In the foreground there is a wooden trellis, in the background a barrier of woven reeds, and then there are infinite varieties of ornamental plants, pines and firs; fruit trees such as oranges and lemons; flowers and birds, all painted with extraordinary realism.
These and other frescoes inspired the reconstruction of the Roman garden in the Getty Villa in Malibu, which is a replica of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum.