©MarinaDeFranceschini - Progetto Accademia

54 - ACCADEMIA ESPLANADE

Description

The Accademia Esplanade starts from the Roccabruna building and after 350 meters reaches the Accademia, making use of the original tufaceous bank. It is leveled by a series of retaining walls.

It was accessed via the Roccabruna ramp and another staircase near the Accademia, which goes up from the Praetorium Esplanade.

Its western side is still bordered by a very long retaining wall with comb-shaped buttresses arranged at regular distance. As for the Terrace of Tempe, we can speak of  a real walling, which protected and made this part of the Villa inaccessible.

On the east side there are other retaining walls, which delimit the northernmost part of the Esplanade. It has a smaller width, about 35 m; then it widens and reaches 110 m. in correspondence with a retaining wall arranged at a right angle to the previous one.

Function and meaning

Nothing is known about this area, which was probably laid out as a garden. Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti hypothesized that it served as a hunting reserve, a sport of which the emperor was very fond; This is very unlikely given that around the Villa there were vast woods in which he could go hunting.

Our Archaeoastronomy studies have shown instead that the Accademia Esplanade, the highest and most isolated of the Villa (closer to divinity) must have been a Sacred Landscape, which connected the buildings of the Accademia and Roccabruna, probably dedicated to the cult of Isis and Osiris.

Sacred processions were probably taking place along the Esplanade in the days of Summer and Winter Solstices.

Bibliography

Marina De Franceschini- Giuseppe Veneziano. Villa Adriana. Architettura Celeste 2011.

Marina De Franceschini,. "Un paesaggio sacro nella Villa Adriana di Tivoli: la Spianata dell’Accademia" in Experiencing the Landscape in Antiquity 2, BAR S3107 (Armando Cristilli, Fabio de Luca, Gioconda di Luca and Alessia Gonfloni eds), published by BAR Publishing (Oxford, 2022), pp. 457-464.