1. TAKE THE MARBLE AND RUN! What?! It would look good in my kitchen...
2. I want to have a dinner party here.
Today at the Villa Adriana, though, these thoughts were especially strong. The Emperor Hadrian built this montruous villa (it's more like a village) in Tivoli, about an hour outside of Rome, during the 2nd century, and employed every bricklayer in Italy for ten years doing so. Even now that most of the architecture has fallen and stands in ruins excavated during the 16th century, I felt an immediate sense of elegance and grandeur upon walking through the porticoed walls surrounding the villa.
Huge, impressive cypress trees line almost every walkway and where they are absent, marble columns stand in their place. Almost every surface of every room - ceilings, walls, floors - were covered either in frescoed plaster, intricate mosaics, or colored slates of marble. I just kept thinking, "I want that in MY house! Why don't I get a villa like this?!" Then I remembered that I was also lacking the rule of a vast empire to match such luxuries...
At one particular point, not far past what used to be the grand entrance hall, my dinner party fantasies (is it still called a dinner party if you have to invite 300 people just to fill the space?) came to a head; I could just see the white Christmas lights twinkling, the buffet tables flanking the fountain, and the waterfalls cascading in the background...
The other thought that crossed my mind as our feet scuffed and thudded along the red volcanic crushed stone and wooden boardwalks guiding us around the ruins, was: Why hasn't anyone tried to capitalize on this place?! A measly five euro entrance fee per person can't do much to fund the upkeep, restoration, and further excavation of a place like this. Granted it was a cloudy Friday when we were there, but we were one of three, maybe four small groups touring, so that means...about 100 euro maximum revenue for the day. I'm all for preserving important ruins and keeping them pristine for archaeologists, students, and tourists alike to learn the history of such a great civilization, but how about a restaurant in there somewhere? I might have paid a pretty penny to take shelter from the spitting skies under one of Hadrian's famed 'pumpkin domes' while having a coffee, maybe some pasta... just a thought. I think I'll leave the capitalization of ancient ruins to my brother Michael, though. He could sell zebra cakes and Lay's potato chips at prices inflated by 400% or more. He'd probably get away with it, too.
In the same little town, just a short bus-ride away from the Villa Adriana lies the Villa d'Este, commissioned by the Cardinal d'Este starting in 1550. It reminded me a lot of the Villa Borghese, what was once the home of the Borghese family here in Rome, and now houses their extravegant private art collection. Each room at the Villa d'Este was more intricate and opulent than the next, and just when I thought that things couldn't get any more ostentatiously beautiful, I walked outside into the garden, for which an entire nearby river was redirected in order to run the fountains:
And I thought my apartment was nice!
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