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Giovanni Battista Piranesi, c. 1761 · Wikimedia Commons
Tivoli
Italia · Roman province·Italy·Founded traditional 1215 BCE (Sabine)
Roman Tibur, a hillside retreat above the Aniene falls. Old sanctuary of Hercules Victor, favored by Rome's senatorial class. Hadrian's villa was still on the drawing board.
A living town of around 55,000 near Rome, home to two UNESCO sites: the uninhabited ruins of Hadrian's Villa and the Renaissance gardens of Villa d'Este.
Excavation history
1550s-1560s
Pirro Ligorio — Ligorio's exploration, naming of areas, and measured drawings of Hadrian's Villa are considered the first large-scale modern archaeological dig at the site.
1950-1955
Salvatore Aurigemma — State-led excavations uncovered numerous statues at the Canopus, including copies of the Erechtheion Caryatids and a portrait head of a young Hadrian.
Notable finds
Doves of Pliny Mosaic
Cardinal Giuseppe Alessandro Furietti dug this opus vermiculatum mosaic of four doves perched on a bronze basin out of Hadrian's Villa in 1737. Pliny the Elder had already described its Pergamene original in his Natural History more than 1,600 years earlier.
Capitoline Museums, Rome, Italy
Furietti Centaurs
Cardinal Furietti unearthed this pair of grey-black marble centaurs — one young and grinning, one old and weary — together at Hadrian's Villa in December 1736. Both carry the signatures of their sculptors, Aristeas and Papias of Aphrodisias.
Capitoline Museums, Rome, Italy
Statue of Osiris-Antinous
Workers unearthed this marble statue of Hadrian's deified favorite Antinous, reimagined as the Egyptian god Osiris, at the Casino Michili on the grounds of Hadrian's Villa in 1740, one of several such images built into the villa's Canopus after Antinous drowned in the Nile in 130 CE.
Vatican Museums (Museo Gregoriano Egizio), Vatican City
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Townley Discobolus
Diggers pulled this marble discus-thrower, a 2nd-century Roman copy of Myron's lost Greek bronze, out of Hadrian's Villa in 1790. Collector Charles Townley bought it, and the British Museum acquired it with the rest of his collection in 1805.
British Museum, London, UK
Wounded Amazon Signed by Sosikles
This marble Wounded Amazon, copied by the sculptor Sosikles from a lost 5th-century-BCE bronze original, came out of Hadrian's Villa and passed through the Albani Collection before landing in the Capitoline Museums.
Capitoline Museums, Rome, Italy
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