Grotto Villa of Tiberius, Sperlonga
About
A natural sea cave at Sperlonga became the centerpiece of a Late Republican villa that Tiberius transformed into an elaborate dining grotto, staging monumental marble sculptures of Scylla and the blinding of Polyphemus around a fish pool inside the cave. Tiberius used the retreat until 26 CE, when a rockfall during a banquet nearly killed him and pushed him to withdraw permanently to Capri. Archaeologists recovered thousands of sculpture fragments from the grotto floor starting in 1957.
What happened here
A working estate with a comfortable house attached, and the proportions vary with how rich the owner is and how often he visits. The farm side has presses for oil and wine, threshing floors, storage sunk into the ground, stables and quarters for the workforce. The residential side has baths, dining rooms sited for the view, mosaics, and a garden with water in it. A manager runs the place year-round and reports; the owner arrives for the vintage and for the summer. Produce goes to market or to the owner's town house, and the accounts are kept in detail. Some villas are pure retreat with no farm at all, built on a cliff or a lake specifically to be looked at from a boat.
In ancient writing
- Tacitus, Annals 4.59
The roof of the dining grotto at Spelunca falls in during dinner; Sejanus crouches over Tiberius to shield him, and the rescuers find him doing it.
Sources
Nearby
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