Old Rome: A Handbook to the Ruins of the City and the CampagnaBurn, Robert
History
Old Rome: A Handbook to the Ruins of the City and the Campagna
Burn, Robert
Rome (Italy) -- Antiquities; Rome (Italy) -- Description and travel
It has been conclusively proved by Becker, that Aurelian’s Temple of the
Sun which was commonly supposed to have occupied the Colonna Gardens, and
to which the huge fragments near the Capitol which lie there were thought
to have belonged, was not here but in the Campus Agrippæ on the Campus
Martius. For the Notitia and the Chronologers both place it in the seventh
region or Via Lata, which occupied the eastern side of the Campus, and
mention castra as attached to it. Further, Vopiscus when describing a
drive in which he accompanied Junius Tiberianus, the prefect of the city,
seems to place the Temple of the Sun at a much greater distance from the
Palatine than the Colonna Gardens are.
The ruin with which it was identified, formerly called turris Mæcenatis,
or Frontispicium Neronis, has now been pulled down, but a part of it, and
especially one huge mass of carved marble, remains in the Colonna Gardens.
Representations of the Frontispicium Neronis as it was before its
destruction, may be seen in Donatus and the older topographers. The
fragments of stonework are now thought to have belonged to the entrance of
the Thermæ of Constantine.
The site of the building erected upon the Quirinal by the mad emperor
Heliogabalus, and called Senaculum Mulierum in which he assembled the
Roman matrons for consultation about the laws of fashion in dress and
manners, is not known.
The site of the Thermæ of Constantine, which are placed by the Notitia
next to the Capitolium antiquum, is tolerably well defined by the notices
of the Anonymous MS. of Einsiedlen, and by an inscription found near the
Quirinal Palace, recording their restoration by Petronius Perpenna
probably in the year 443. Both of these indicate the Palazzo Rospigliosi
as standing upon the ground once occupied by the central building of the
Thermæ. The Anonymous MS. mentions the Thermæ on the road between the
Church of S. Agata and that of S. Vitale. Pozzio, Albertini, Fulvius, Q.
Fauno, and Gamucci, all agree in confirming this evidence. Large portions
of the ruins were still standing in their time, and in Du Perac’s views,
published in the seventeenth century, the central part of the buildings is
represented. Another part of the ruins of these baths was found in the
construction of the Quirinal Palace in the time of Paul V.
[Sidenote: Statues found in the Thermæ of Constantine.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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