Hadrian's Villa

Several villas of the Republican period already occupied the artificial terraces of the site, one or more of them possibly inherited by Hadrian's wife Vibia Sabina; the one later absorbed into the Imperial Palace had itself been built in three periods, from Sulla's time to that of Augustus. Hadrian began his own construction at the end of 118 or the beginning of 119, a few months after reaching Rome, the majority of the earliest brick stamps being dated to 117, which would have been made in advance. Stamps recovered from about half the buildings suggest three particularly active phases, roughly 118 to 121, 125 to 128 and 134 to 138.

Hadrian spent many years of his reign visiting the provinces of the empire. His presence at the villa is first documented in 125, after his return from his first journey, and he began using it as his official residence around 128. It was greatly enlarged while he was away on the second and third journeys, so that completed buildings awaited him when he returned in about 130, which left him at most six years of residence there; a large court lived on the site permanently, and visitors had to be housed and entertained in numbers. He is documented there again in 135, after his last journey, and is believed to have retired there towards the end of his life. Building continued into the late 130s, with brick stamps from the South Theatre dated to 137, and some of it may have been unfinished when he died in 138.

The villa was used occasionally by Hadrian's successors and remained important enough for busts of Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus, Septimius Severus and Caracalla to be found on the premises, and third-century brick stamps record repairs. Diocletian restored it during the final decades of the third century. By the fourth century at the latest, after Constantine founded Constantinople in 330, decay and exploitation had set in and statues, high-quality marble and other furnishings were gradually removed; the villa was probably abandoned before 476. During the Gothic War between the Ostrogoths and the Byzantines, from 535 to 554, the complex served as a military camp for both sides. Further material was carried off for other purposes as the diocese of Tivoli expanded, and in the Middle Ages the ground was reduced to farmland while the ruins were quarried for the marble and decoration that went into the houses of Tivoli and for stone to burn into lime.

In 1434 Ciriaco d'Ancona recognised the ruins as an imperial residence, and the humanist Flavio Biondo cited the villa in his writings in 1450; Pope Pius II visited and wrote about it roughly a decade later, which sharpened architectural interest in the place. From the end of the fifteenth century the attention of humanists, patrons, popes, cardinals and nobles was frankly predatory. Excavations in search of statues and marble were commissioned by Pope Alexander VI, then by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, then by Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este, for whom Pirro Ligorio removed large quantities of material both for the Villa d'Este nearby and for the cardinal's villa in Rome. Ligorio also made the first topographical survey of the site, dated to about 1560 and now in the library at Windsor. Digging multiplied from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, undertaken among others by the landowners whose property covered parts of the villa, among them Count Fede and the Jesuits, who held the ground of the Pecile. The Academy, in the hands of the Bulgarini family since the seventeenth century and opened only to scholars, gave up the Barberini Candelabra in 1630, now in the Vatican Museums, and in 1736 and 1737 the two Centaurs of Aristeas and Papias, a faun in red marble and the Doves mosaic, now in the Capitoline collections. More than three hundred major works were dispersed into private collections and museums across half of Europe.

In 1870 the state bought the estate from the Braschi family, then the largest landowner on the site, although other parts remained, and remain, in private hands. Excavations and restorations followed, bringing the architecture back to light along with surviving stucco and mosaic; the work continues and the exploration of the site is far from complete. In 1881 Lanciani found a statue of Dionysus in a room under the stairs by the Libraries, now in the Museo Nazionale, along with a hoard of 2,672 silver coins. Most of the ground belongs to the Republic of Italy and was managed from 2014 by the Polo Museale del Lazio; since September 2016 it has been administered together with the Villa d'Este, the sanctuary of Hercules Victor, the Mensa Ponderaria and the mausoleum of the Plautii by a single body that took the name VILLAE.

UNESCO designated the villa a World Heritage Site in 1999, fixing its boundaries and creating a buffer zone in which no new construction was permitted. In 2011 the commune of Tivoli announced plans, later cancelled, for a waste dump near the villa, and approved public housing on 120,000 square metres inside the buffer zone. At its 36th annual meeting the World Heritage Committee formally addressed these encroachments, commending the abandonment of the dump but asking to be told of any major development planned in the buffer zone and requesting an updated conservation report by February 2014, a reflection of concern at the deterioration of the exposed ruins. The listing itself was called into question over the building permissions Tivoli had granted in 2011, and the committee could propose that World Heritage status be revoked if the approved buildings in the buffer zone went up.

In 1998 a section on the road to the grand vestibule was rediscovered and named the Antinoeion by scholars, its large concrete foundation taken as the original site of the obelisk of Antinous now on the Pincian Hill in Rome. Whether it was the tomb of Antinous, Hadrian's lover, deified after his early death, or a heavily Egyptianised nymphaeum is argued both ways. An Egyptian sphinx was found in the area of the Palestra in 2006 and a statue of the god Horus in the form of a falcon in 2013. In 2019 UNESCO designated the villa a site with special immunity from wartime activity, and in February 2021 archaeologists led by Rafael Hidalgo Prieto of the Pablo de Olavide University announced the identification of a water triclinium and a separate dining room.