A beautifully decorated room has been
discovered at Emperor Nero's famed Domus Aurea (Golden House) in
Rome and brought back to light after 2,000 years.
The hall is decorated with panthers, centaurs and a
delightful sphinx.
Experts chanced upon the room while they were doing
restoration work on the vault of a neighbouring part of the
palace.
"It is the fruit of our strategy that focuses on conservation
and scientific research," said Alfonsina Russo, the head of the
Colosseum archaeological park that the Domus Aurea belongs to.
The discovery was revealed to ANSA first.
"It is an exceptional and thrilling find," Russo told
reporters.
The discovery was made in the last few months of last year,
archaeologists and restorers told ANSA.
It was made thanks to a platform erected to restore the vault
of room 72 od the sprawling and sumptuous complex, one of the
150 rooms hitherto rediscovered in the grand House the
controversial emperor built in 64 AD after the great fire that
devastated Rome, in which he is generally but erroneously said
to have fiddled.
"We came across a large opening positioned in the northern
corner of the covering of the room," said Alessandro D'Alessio,
the official in charge of the Domus Aurea.
The lamps the restorers had at their disposal did the rest,
he said in describing the magical moment of discovery.
"Lit up by the artificial light, there suddenly appeared the
entire barrel vault of a completely frescoed adjacent room", he
said.
The restorers immediately decided to salvage the new room,
with an intervention that ended at the start of this year,
d'Alessio said.
Much of the room, which is rectangular and covered in rich
decoration including the vault, is still unfortunately
underground, buried by tonnes of earth on the orders of the
architects of Emperor Trajan, who built luxurious baths over
Nero's former palace, archaeologists said.
It will remain so, they said, because of fears for the
stability of the complex.
Among the decorations, on a white background, are elegant
small figures divided into pictures bordered in red and golden
yellow.
In one scene we see the god Pan, in another a man armed with
a sword, quiver and shield who is fighting a panther, and in
another the small sphinx that is standing out on a pedestal,
officials said.
There are also stylized aquatic creatures, both real and
imagined, architectural motifs of the time, vegetal garlands and
branches of trees with delicate green, yellow, red leaves, as
well as festoons of flowers and fruit and posing birds.
This type of decoration, which is also found in the Domus on
the Colle Oppio and in other rooms of the Golden House including
the Cryptoporticus 92, has led experts to attribute the Room of
the Sphinx to the so-called A Workshop, which operated between
65 and 68 AD.
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