Nero's Golden House was worth a lifetime of waiting; it's Rome's greatest hidden treasure

Before the pandemic, Rome’s Colosseum was averaging 20,000 to 25,000 visitors a day. While numbers are still far below that, the effort we needed to push through the milling crowds, guides and hawkers outside the metro station across the street is a reminder that while Europe's best-known attractions are magnificent, the effort needed to fight the crowds in order to see them can take both the joy and the awe out of the experience. 

There’s another option, just a few hundred metres further up the street, that offers all the magic of time travel back to ancient Rome, but with so few people you can feel like an explorer discovering its secret depths for the first time. Readers, I give you the extraordinary Domus Aurea, or Golden House of the Emperor Nero. This little-known treasure, closed to tourists for most of modern history, left me on the brink of tears of excitement and wonder.

In this blog I’ve introduced you to several rulers whose patronage of the arts outstripped their talent for leadership, most notably Charles II and George IV. But in this list of “misunderstood” connoisseurs*,  Nero gets the gold star.

Amongst the spectacular abuses of power (and PR disasters) laid at his feet is his reaction to Rome’s great fire of 64AD. While there is historical evidence of him re-housing the poor and sending out fire-fighting crews, what everyone remembers is him fiddling while Rome burned, and the way he cleared more than a square mile of the city centre to build himself an opulent new palace. The place was legendary for its marble walls studded with gemstones, gold enhancements and exceptional frescoes. The Colosseum stands on what was once the ornamental lake. 

Nero was assassinated before his vision could be complete, and his successors were embarrassed by his profligacy. (Much as Queen Victoria was by her uncle’s OTT Brighton Pavilion.)  They stripped out the ornaments, re-purposed parts of the complex and filled in others with earth to provide the foundations for Trajan’s enormous public baths complex. It’s this last section that you can see today, thanks to a local falling through a sinkhole into one of the rooms in the 1480s.

But wait! I hear you thinking. If it was re-discovered more than 500 years ago, why isn’t this place better known? If you studied art history, it is. A procession of famous artists, including Michelangelo and Raphael, scrambled around the cavernous discoveries marvelling at the paintings and incorporating the designs into their work. Artists and architects have been copying the Domus Aurea's walls ever since. It became quite the thing for grand tourists to have themselves lowered through holes in the palace ceilings (see below) and leave their initials carved in unadorned bits of ancient plaster. The Marquis de Sade and Richard Wagner are amongst the famous spelunkers. 

But access since the turn of the 20th century, when the government started taking firmer control of its heritage sites, has been a tricky thing. Through most of the last century access was limited to archaeologists and academics with a specific interest. The general public finally got access in 1999, but the place was shuttered again six years later after floods, ceiling collapses and a worrying decline in the state of the frescoes. 

Sixteen years of restoration have worked wonders. Architecturally, the whole site has been stabilised, including skimming much of the vegetation and earth off the top and replacing it with a lighter-weight garden full of plants familiar to the ancient Romans. The paintings have been restored and augmented with sympathetic pieces of sculpture throughout. 

There’s a dramatic new exit … like the Louvre pyramid, a beautiful example of modern design dropped into a historic space. 

Nero’s famous octagonal dining room, with alcoves off five sides and a dome that once had an inner shell that depicted the constellations, rotated, and dropped rose petals on diners, is the culmination of your visit and a gallery space currently telling the story of the Domus Aurea’s influence on Raphael. My corporate event instincts tell me that with its modern entry/exit and the flexible nature of the octagon and alcoves, Nero’s former dining room will soon be available to hire for events.

The most dramatic, and visible, contribution of the recent restoration is a dramatic lighting scheme. (You can watch a video about how they did it here.) Sensors activate lights when guides come and go, so you’re exploring the whole site in puddles of light flickering out of the gloom, just as the Renaissance artists would have. In key spots, there are video screens offering views of what the area would originally have looked like.

In the larger spaces, lighting designers have worked to simulate a subtle, golden daylight as close as possible to the building’s original design. 

This part of the palace was essentially a giant pleasure pavilion with one side open to the air, natural sunlight flooding through open porticoes and high windows. In many places, dramatic spots highlight statuary against the gloom beyond. Designers selected the tone of each room’s lighting to bring out as much colour and detail as possible in the wall paintings.

The overall effect is stunning, as if you are the first to see these secret spaces in centuries. And with tours limited to 25, there are times where you can actually be completely alone, adding to that sense of adventure. Unfortunately, I do have to mention that what’s dramatic and atmospheric for most can be debilitating for the vision impaired. My husband, who is blind in one eye and thus has little depth perception and an extreme sensitivity to quick changes in light, found the whole place extremely challenging.

For me, however, the Domus Aurea was possibly the most exciting thing I’ve done since the thrill of setting foot in the forum for the first time 45 years ago. Part of it was certainly that atmospheric sense of discovery. But it was also the sheer beauty of room after room of ancient frescoes. Some are plain blocks of colour. Some architectural frameworks. 

Some landscapes or mythological scenes. By far the most exciting to my eyes, as they were to the Renaissance artists, were the tiny decorative details of flowers, foliage, architectural elements and strange half-human, half animal creatures. Before modern language changed the meaning to something negative, these were known as “grotesques”, referring to their discovery in a cave, or grotta. 

I could have remained for hours in admiration, and would have loved to sit and sketch, but I suspect those high tech lights would go off on me.

The official website (where you need to go for advance tickets, which are essential for entry) tempts with a virtual reality experience, but it's currently a dead link and there was no sign of it on site. I assume it's in development and I'll be able to return to a digital space soon to explore more. Ironically, it's the promise of deeper understanding of a 2,000-year-old building that's finally tempting me into the latest digital craze. Bring on the metaverse, with a plate of lark's tongues, a bottle of garum sauce and a glass of Falernian wine. And don't forget those falling rose petals, please. 

If you'd like to see more of my experience, I've posted a YouTube video here.

*Was Nero misunderstood? A recent exhibition at the British Museum explored just that question. You can read my review here.