Week 4 Hadrian's Villa

This weekend marks the halfway point of the program. The first couple of weeks seemed to go by at normal pace, but once I got comfortable with the city it started to fly by. Under that analysis, the next four weeks are going to be even quicker.

This past Saturday a few of us went to Hadrian’s Villa just outside of Rome near Tivoli. We took the underground metro for most of the way, and took a longer-than-expected bus ride to bottom of Tivoli (being that the main part of the town is atop a mountain). The bus driver was incredibly nice, after asking for directions to the Villa, he let us off close to the Villa (which I don’t think it was a designated bus stop).

The Villa was Hadrian’s retreat from Rome  during his reign. Being dissatisfied with his palace on the Palentine Hill, he later used the villa for ruling the Roman Empire. The vast scale of the villa took me by surprise. Over 30 known buildings, in addition of orchards were included in the Villa complex. Most the structures were large in scale, such as the Bath complex and various seasonal Palace’s on site. Being that Hadrian was responsible for having the Pantheon reconstructed after a fire, I can definitely see the influence of the Pantheon’s dome design on the bath complexes in the Villa.

 Getting back to Rome was interesting due to the face since the bus driver let us off just on the street and not at a bus station, we had to find a real bus station. Being the street was a one way (which we neglected to spot that detail at first) we had to find the street that ran in the opposite direction. After asking some locals in broken Italian for directions they were kind and responded back with directions in broken English. With a lot of hand gestures, and piecing together what they had just told us, we managed to walk straight to the Bus stop and safety arrived back into Rome.