Academy of Hadrian's Villa

2006 World Monuments Watch

In the second century a.d., the Roman emperor Hadrian built a country villa east of the capital to escape the pressures of Rome. Covering some 80 hectares, the complex included typical Roman structures as well as monuments that echo the architecture that Hadrian had seen in his travels abroad. The Academy is a lesser-known collection of sacred and secular buildings, including a circular temple of Apollo, erected on an upper hill of the villa grounds. Abandoned in a.d 544, the villa was “rediscovered” in the fifteenth century when Pope Pius II began excavations there. A century later, the land that housed the Academy became the property of the Bulgarini family, who destroyed many of the structures to make way for an olive grove. While today the central monuments and gardens of the emperor’s villa are a popular World Heritage site, the overgrown remains of the Academy, which is on private land, languish from lack of funding needed for documentation and conservation work.