In ancient Rome, exactly in the year 64 BC, there was a terrible fire that destroyed a large part of the city. From the ashes of this fire rose Nero’s Domus Aurea, the Golden House.

The construction of this sumptuous residence was entrusted to the architects Severo and Celere, and was so large that it occupied almost the entire centre of Rome, an area of about 80 hectares, almost 200 acres.
The overall idea of the Domus Aurea, its proportions and its luxurious decorations, was completely innovative, comparable only to the royal palaces in Alexandria in Egypt and in the Orient.

These ideals had inspired Nero and it was these models that that were the inspiration for a grandiose and absolute imperial power. Nero went so far as to cast himself in the figure of the Sun God in a gigantic statue, the bronze Colossus, more than 33 metres tall, placed to adorn the entrance of his new home.
The splendour of the Domus Aurea died along with its prince. His successors, the Flavians , wanted to rid themselves of Nero’s image and so returned the area occupied by the palace to public use and destroyed most of the buildings.
 
They began the construction of the monumental stone amphitheatre, the Coliseum, in the valley between the Oppian Hill and the Celio, in the space previously occupied by the stagnum Neronis (Nero’s pond), the lake in the garden of the Domus Aurea,
Only the pavilion of the Oppian Hill, which can now be visited in part, survived the urban renovation up to the time the works for the realization of Trajan’s Baths began.

And so Nero’s palace was filled with earth. It had already been stripped of its marble and works of art, which were then used to build the new baths, but if on the one hand this operation cancelled the memory of the building, on the other hand it has permitted the preservation of the residential nucleus of the Oppian Hill to the present day. Following this, on the ruins of Trajan’s Baths, fallen into disuse after the acqueduct was severed by Vitige, king of the Ostrogoths, in 539 BC., gardens and vineyards sprang up and characterized the new landscape of the hillside that had held Nero’s Golden Palace.
 
The discovery of the Domus Aurea happened by chance at the end of the 15th Century at the hand of some curious souls with a passion for antiquities who, lowering themselves from above into the filled in grottoes, began to copy the decorations on the vaults, furthering in the next century the fame and fortune of “grotesque” art (from grotto, only later did the term come to mean distorted or monstrous).

The discovery of the Domus Aurea marked the beginning of the discovery of ancient painting. Famous artists like Raffaello, Pinturicchil, Ghirlandaio, Giovanni da Udine and others, used the walls of the Domus as inspiration for the decorations of residences of Cardinals and the Roman aristocracy, in the Vatican, Castel Sant’Angelo, Villa Madama.
In 1506, while digging in a vineyard on the Oppian Hill, the Laocoonte group, one of the most famous works of sculpture from antiquity, was uncovered.
 
The presence of the famous group in the vicinity of the Domus Aurea is not surprising if one considers that ancient sources often cite Nero’s obsession for collecting. Nero had carried out raids throughout Greece for material to decorate the rooms of his palace, a true museum of classic and Greek masterpieces, among which were probably the bronze statues of the Galati vinti, later moved with the rest of the goods, to Vespasian’s Temple of Peace, so that it could be given back to the people to enjoy.

Today, the central group of buildings of the Oppian Hill is the most impressive It extends about 400 metres on one side and is composed of about 150 rooms opening around an octagonal hall, the real fulcrum of the complex. The rooms are mostly covered with barrel vaults which range in height from 10 to 11 metres. The layout, or what remains of it, shows two sectors: the western sector has a rectangular garden-courtyard surrounded by a portico with ionic columns, along the sides of which are the rooms that some believe make up the private apartments of Nero’s residence.

In this sector lie some of the most famous rooms: the Room with the Owl Vault, so called because of the decorations which were reproduced in drawings and engravings in the 1700s; the Ninfeo of Ulysses and Polyphemus the Cyclops, which takes its name from the mosaic in the centre of the vault, was known in other ninfei in Emperor’s villas in Castel Gandolfo and Tivoli.

 
The eastern sector of the Domus is even more intricately structured, centred around the octagonal room and the two courtyards which open out from it. Some, without a strong basis, would like to attribute the shape and position of the central room to the movement of the solar system and the earth which is constantly rotating, which was mentioned by Svetonio.

In this eastern sector of the Palace is the Room with the Golden Vault, with its magnificent multicolored decorations; the Room of Achilles in Sciro, named after the subject in the central painting of the vault, which depicts the famous Homeric episode of the Achaean (Greek) hero hidden by Teti on the Island of Sciro among the daughters of Kin Licomede, so as to escape the dangers of the Trojan war; Hector and Andromeda’s Room, this too inspired by Homer’s epic poem, depicting Hector’s farewell to his wife and son, Astianatte.

The Oppian Hill complex has no doors, bathrooms, service areas nor heating system, which would exclude the pavilion as a permanent residence. It was most likely reserved as a place of rest and relaxation for the Emperor and his guests, in a structure rich in natural beauty and works of art.
 
The painted decorations, the pargetry (stuccowork), and some fragments of mosaics are all that remain of the luxury and the original wealth of the Domus. There are frescoes that cover entire walls of the corridors and connecting passages, but the main rooms were covered in precious imported marble.
 
The restoration works done document an abundant use of gold leaf and confirm what the sources reveal: the use of gems and other precious stones, as Seneca described in the sentence “a shining house with the glitter of gold.

At the beginning of the 1980s, the Domus Aurea, which up to that time had only been partially open to visit by scholars and specialists, was completely closed because of reasons of safety and for maintenance.
The specialists, architects, archeologists, art historians, restorers, must now face numerous and complex problems.

The direct experiments carried out by the Central Institute for Restoration and Archaeology in Rome between 1983 and 1986, to circumscribe the rooms, to install a new type of artificial lighting, and to monitor the stages of deterioration, have produced clear data, that are now the basis for future restoration.