A Podcast About Rome. Episode 11: Nero's Golden House.

This is more an illustrated podcast (or a narrated selection of photographs) because there were just too many good images to choose from.

In his life of Nero Suetonius tells us:

“There was nothing however in which [Nero] was more ruinously prodigal than in building. He made a palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which at first he called the House of Passage [Domus Transitoria], but when it was burned shortly after its completion and rebuilt, the Golden House [Domus Aurea].”

One of the more unlikely heirs of Nero’s Golden House. Phone box in my London neighbourhood. Clerkenwell Green, 13 February 2023.

The vast palace complex of the Domus Aurea was the work, according to Pliny, of the architects Severus and Celer and made use of land cleared by the great fire of 64 CE (the one in which Nero is said to have fiddled while Rome burned). It occupied all or part of three of the seven hills of Rome.

Agrippina and Nero nose to nose, indicative of his mother’s role as his Empress. (photo: Wikipedia commons)