![]() There were walls sheathed in polychrome marble, vaults and ceilings covered in vibrant frescoes by the artist Fabullus, and in precious stones, ivory, and gold, and gardens full of masterpieces of sculpture from Greece and Asia Minor. 64 fire that destroyed the city center and cleared the space that it would occupy-perhaps explaining the persistent suspicion held by many Romans that the emperor himself had set the fire-the vast property had hundreds of rooms. Constructed by the emperor Nero and born from the ashes of the massive A.D. there was no building in Rome as sumptuous, ornate, or grand as the Domus Aurea, or “Golden House,” a lavish imperial residence and sprawling park covering hundreds of acres in an area known as the Oppian Hill between the Palatine and Esquiline Hills on the city’s northern side. In other parts of the house, everything was covered in gold and adorned with jewels and mother-of-pearl dining rooms with fretted ceilings whose ivory panels could be turned so that flowers or perfumes from pipes were sprinkled down from above the main hall of the dining rooms was round, and it would turn constantly day and night like the Heavens there were baths, flowing with seawater and with the sulfur springs of the Albula when he dedicated this house, that had been completed in this manner, he approved of it only so much as to say that he could finally begin to live like a human being. A house whose size and elegance these details should be sufficient to relate: Its courtyard was so large that a 120-foot colossal statue of the emperor himself stood there it was so spacious that it had a mile-long triple portico also there was a pool of water like a sea, that was surrounded by buildings which gave it the appearance of cities and besides that, various rural tracts of land with vineyards, cornfields, pastures, and forests, teeming with every kind of animal both wild and domesticated. ![]() In no other matter did he act more wasteful than in building a house that stretched from the Palatine to the Esquiline Hill, which he originally named “Transitoria”, but when soon afterwards it was destroyed by fire and rebuilt he called it “Aurea”.
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