The setting of Hadrian’s villa near Tivoli takes full advantage of landscape: the view embraces mountains in one direction, distant Rome and the sea in the other. There is the color of pines, olives, ripe grain, pasture, and vineyard, the sound of cicadas by day and nightingales at twilight. And when the villa was new, everywhere was the sound of water and the color of marble. For this enormous Folly, this Roman Versailles, the immensity of all this space devoted to the whims of one man, untrammelled by any limitations of technique or money, is the perfected product of 200 years of Roman experience in elegant country living. Its builder occupied it but little. Eleven of the twenty-one restless years of his reign were spent in foreign travel. He named parts of his villa for famous buildings and places he had seen in the Greek East: the Academy and the Painted Porch (_Stoa Poecile_) in Athens, the Canopus near Alexandria. He even created a mile of cryptoporticoes which he called a “Hell” (_Inferi_, the Lower Regions): in his tortured life he had been there, too, as we shall see. But the buildings are idiosyncratic, not imitative, except in the creative Roman way. Hadrian, the Spaniard, was quick to learn. He always spoke Latin with an accent (his Greek was better), but his architecture was pure Graeco-Roman, using the architectural vocabulary of the past to create a new architectural language of his own. His earliest architectural essay at the villa, to judge from the brick stamps, is the so-called “_Teatro Marittimo_” (the round complex at G; see also Fig. 11.4). Its earliest bricks date from the first year of his reign. (Of course the bricks need not have been used in the year they were made, and indeed will often have been put aside for several years to season.) Some bricks in the fabric of the _Teatro Marittimo_ are dated A.D. 123, an _annus mirabilis_ in Roman brick production, to meet the vast requirements of Hadrian’s many projects, some ready to build, some still on the drawing-board. These bricks point to later restorations of the original plan, but the point here is that the fundamental design, very characteristic of Hadrian, must have been laid down early. Much light on this complex, and on the villa as a whole, has been cast by the sensitive, perceptive work of the German Heinz Kähler, who, undaunted by the burning of all his carefully drawn plans in World War II, redid and published them in 1950, illuminating as never before our picture of Hadrian as man and architect. [Illustration: FIG. 11.4 Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa, Teatro Marittimo, air view. (H. Kähler, _Rom und seine Welt_, Pl. 188)]