The entrance to the _Teatro Marittimo_ was through a portico to the north (at the bottom of the air photograph) which approached a door in a high circular brick wall, insuring complete privacy from the rest of the villa. Inside the wall was a circular portico, concentric with the portico a moat. The _Teatro Marittimo_ is now restored (through the philanthropy of an Italian tire manufacturer, impressed by the likeness of its plan to his product), and the moat is filled with water. When it was dry, its floor showed a pair of grooves in an arc, one on either side of the main axis. The grooves were made by the rollers of a drawbridge worked from a small room on the edge of the inner circle. On the site of one of the drawbridges there is now a permanent foot-bridge, visible in the air photograph. On the circular island, the columned arc between the drawbridges is a vestibule where the Emperor might receive his friends. Beyond it is a diamond-shaped peristyle, originally with a fountain in the middle: its sides are segments of circles which if projected would be tangent to the outer wall of the moat. Beyond the peristyle is an apsidal room; the apse has the same arc as the vestibule. This would be a pleasant place for intimate dinner parties. The rooms on either side might be bedrooms. A broad window opens from the dining room onto the moat, with a view directly on an alcove let into the circular wall on the axis of the far side. From the alcove the view leads through eleven differently shaped and differently lighted spaces back to the entrance portico and a far-distant fountain to the north. It remains to describe the rooms east and west of the peristyle. The central apsidal room of the three on the west (to the right of the peristyle in the air photograph) is a deep bath with a window over the moat. Steps lead up to the low sill: Hadrian could choose between tub and moat for bathing. To the south is the dressing room, to the north the steam bath and furnace room. East of the peristyle is a circular room whose interior cross-walls form a double T, creating two alcoves for reading. Each would be appropriate to its season: the eastern for winter mornings and summer afternoons, the western for summer mornings and winter afternoons. The two adjoining rooms would be just right for a small library, of some 1500 rolls, half Greek and half Latin; the main library lay conveniently to the southwest (right center in the air photograph). It is tempting to see in this suite of rooms the study where the Emperor wrote his resigned, sentimental, mannered little poem to his soul (or is it to the soul of his beloved Antinous?): “_Little soul, gentle and drifting, Guest and companion of my body, Now you will dwell below in pallid places, Stark and bare; There you will abandon your play of yore._” The remaining odd corners would house latrines, little conservatories, cupboards, and pantries.