Villa Jovis

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Ruin of the Villa Jovis
Restored part of Villa Jovis

The Villa Jovis was one of the twelve villas of the Roman Emperor Tiberius on Capri , where he had retired in the last years of his reign. It is located on the eastern tip of Capri directly on the steep coast on the mountain known today as Monte Tibero.

Translated, the name means "country house of Jupiter ", another name is "Tiberius villa". Pliny the Elder calls the palace, which drops 300 m steeply into the sea in the north and east, also as the "Castle of Tiberius".

architecture

The palace is built on the slope that leads up to the northeast tip of the island. The main terrace is at ground level in the north and east, but towers above the sloping slope by up to 40 m in the west and south. Eight floors serve as a sub-construction and house a huge, centrally located cistern . In the western basement the accommodations for the servants were accommodated, in the south the thermal baths and the administration rooms . The imperial private apartments were on the first floor below the main terrace. A double staircase led from the entrance on the lowest floor eight floors up to the main terrace, where the imperial reception and dining rooms were located. The building has a total built-up area of ​​7000 m². Little of the materials has been preserved, but all floors were frescoed , the floor was laid with mosaics and the main terrace was laid out with different colored marble. On the north side, a covered corridor leads to a portico with a dining exedra , from where you have a fantastic view over the Gulf of Naples and Mount Vesuvius.

In addition to the building, there were also forests, gardens, nymphaea , a preserved signal tower for communication with Rome and a "lighthouse" for astrological observation. The foundations of this tower are so huge that the lighthouse could compete with the wonder of the world of Alexandria - Krause estimates its height at approx. 130 m.

New type of ruler's palace

The palace is not based on the Roman models of an atrium house - not even in the expanded form with a Greek peristyle - but for the first time Tiberius is using only Hellenistic models for a residential house, namely a concept that was already adopted by Philip II of Macedonia was used in the royal residence of Aigai : around a square peristyle courtyard, dining rooms of different sizes are grouped without room sequence or axis symmetry, which allowed the king to dine with as large a number of his philoi ("friends") and hetairoi ("companions"). Since the villa was by no means just a “private” retreat, but rather served Tiberius as the administrative center of the empire, he broke not only architecturally but also socio-politically with the Roman tradition when building the Villa Jovis: instead of every morning “public” communication of the state elite in the form of the staggered reception rituals with the senators on the Palatine Hill, the emperor on Capri used to have "private" communication at evening festivals with personally selected guests - senators, but also people from all other classes such as Greek philosophers and astrologers, actors and musicians. The decisive factor is no longer social class, but closeness to the emperor. Instead of the Augustan principate and his fiction of equal ranking of all senators, among whom the emperor stands out as princeps solely through his merits and his dignitas , the idea of ​​the state of the Hellenistic monarchies is cemented in the Villa Jovis, the senators are degraded to - albeit prominent - subjects . As a result, the senators never forgave Tiberius for leaving Rome and for cutting off communication with the Senate as an independent organ of the state - the senatorial historiography of a Tacitus and (indirectly) Suetons continues the discriminatory topoi of sexual excesses of the aging emperor a century later Capri eagerly with pleasure boys and has shaped the image of Tiberius to this day.

history

Reconstruction by Karl Weichardt , 1900

The inhospitable island of Capri was already very attractive to Emperor Augustus . He exchanged them for the wine-rich Ischia from the city of Naples and erected individual buildings. Emperor Tiberius resided here for most of the year from the year 27 AD. The emperor wanted to withdraw from Rome and still be close to the imperial headquarters. Capri offered him safe seclusion (there is only a small port and hardly any landing places because of the rugged cliffs) and yet proximity to Rome (the emperor could stand in direct contact with his prefect in Rome with a beacon and be there by ship within three days). Above all, Capri reminded him of his years in Rhodes : How there he could build a villa high above the sea and surround himself with Greeks - the Gulf of Naples was less Roman than Greek.

The villa was built around the year 27 AD. Tiberius lived here until his death. On the day of his death there was an earthquake that caused the "lighthouse" to collapse. Under Emperor Nero , another earthquake in AD 61 caused parts of the palace to collapse - the sub-structures were reinforced during the reconstruction. After 180 AD, Emperor Commodus banished his sister Lucilla to Capri. After that, the palace was neglected by the emperors. In the Middle Ages it fell apart; the main terrace and its halls were demolished or collapsed, so that today only the ruins of the substructures can be admired. These preserved remains are so impressive that researchers of the 20th century assumed that the palace had five or a maximum of six floors. Only Clemens Krause took up the concept of a seventh floor as the main terrace (for a picture of this reconstruction see web link). A small chapel was built in the ruin, which is covered with spolia and a. Mosaics - from the villa is decorated.

literature

Web links

Commons : Villa Jovis  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 40 ° 33 ′ 30 ″  N , 14 ° 15 ′ 44 ″  E