entry Mar 2009
The Temple of Venus in Baia
One of the
most interesting bits of architecture in the
vast outdoor (and underwater!) museum that is Baia is
the so-called Temple of Venus (photo, right) . It is
directly adjacent on the west to the entrance to the
small lovely port of modern Baia. The structure was
built in the reign of Hadrian (117-137 AD). It offers
striking evidence of the evolution that took place in
Roman architecture during the Julio-Caludian period.
There is a clear difference between this building,
characterized by a high tambour (the circular vertical
part of the cupola) with a circular internal plan and
external octagonal one with large windows, and the
elementary structure of other, earlier buildings in the
area. The use of opus
cementicium as the main binding ingredient had
reached perfection; this is a mixture of stone chips and
strong mortar that contained pozzolana (a volcanic ash named for
the town of Pozzuoli).
This newer technology as well as an increasingly
specialized workforce led to the construction of
buildings where space was conceived of in a different
and very modern way; mixtilinear (combing both straight
and curved lines) forms of architecture started to
become more widespread and were marked by bright spaces
designed to be aesthetic and pleasing to the eye and not
merely lived in.
This Temple of Venus is “so-called” because it
was really something else (as is the case with a number
of other “temples” in the area—the
Temple of Serapis in
Pozzuoli, for example). In this
case excavation has shown the structure to have been a
thermal bath, the baths of which reach down to about six
meters below today’s visible ground level. The outer
face is in brick, with large porticos of reticulatum;
inside, the walls were dressed with slabs of marble up
to the impost of the windows and higher up with mosaic.
The outside still shows traces of the original stone
facing. The dome was formed by an umbrella vault; a part
of the octagonal roof remains visible from the outside.
The lower part of the building, on which other
only partially visible buildings lean, has become
difficult to interpret; this is due not just to the
lowering of the ground level caused by seismic activity,
but also due to the restoration designed to reinforce
the structure at the beginning of the 20th century. The
thermal baths were connected to a structure in the rear
and stretched along the slope of the hill.
[Other entries dealing with Baia and the immediate environs:
The Baia Castle and Museum; The Imperial Port of Baia; Miseno; The Sireno Aqueduct;
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