Domus Aurea

Overview

The Domus Aurea (The Golden House) is Emperor Nero’s infamous, mind-bogglingly opulent, vastly sprawling ancient palace complex. Completely buried underground across the Oppian Hill, it acts as a staggering, deeply eerie subterranean testament to absolutely limitless imperial megalomania.

Highlights

• The Octagonal Room: The absolute architectural masterpiece of the palace. It is a massive, deeply jaw-dropping octagonal dining hall featuring a concrete dome with an oculus that supposedly fiercely rotated via water power, raining perfumes and petals on Nero's guests.
• The Scale: Walking fiercely through endless, massive, highly vaulted, deeply echoing brick corridors that are currently 30 feet entirely underground.
• The Renaissance Signatures: Look closely fiercely high up on the ceilings to see where brilliant Renaissance painters like Raphael aggressively scratched their names into the 1st-century frescoes when they lowered themselves through holes to study the "grotesque" Roman art.

History

Following the highly suspicious Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD (which conveniently cleared hundreds of acres in the city center), Nero fiercely confiscated the land to build this insanely massive "country villa" in the city. It featured gold-leafed frescoes, ivory ceilings, and massive artificial lakes. Following Nero's violent suicide, his successors aggressively filled the entire massive palace with dirt to completely erase his hated memory, brilliantly unintentionally instantly preserving the entire structure perfectly underground for nearly 2,000 years.

Visitor Tips

• Mandatory Tours: Because it is an active, deeply complex archaeological dig site heavily prone to structural issues, you absolutely cannot enter without booking one of the highly excellent, specially guided tours (often only on weekends).