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Updated: May 24, 2025
As for the palace of Tiberius, not one of its stones can be seen; its remains lie buried beneath a lovely public garden; whilst of the neighbouring palace of Caligula, overhanging the Forum, there are only some huge substructures, akin to those of the house of Severus buttresses, lofty arcades, which upheld the palace, vast basements, so to say, where the praetorians were posted and gorged themselves with continual junketings.
And finally there is the most extraordinary and gigantic of all the tombs, that known as Casale Rotondo, which is so large that it has been possible to establish a farmhouse and an olive garden on its substructures, which formerly upheld a double rotunda, adorned with Corinthian pilasters, large candelabra, and scenic masks.*
This shadowy wreck of ancient times lies on hills and among them. It has an air of mountain savagery. It looks like a ruined mediæval fortress. Broken archways, once part of the Appian Way, are made into substructures for ragged, ruinous modern houses. The place is peaked and pined, desolate, hungry and savage.
I seemed to see pass by the zones of painted bassi-relievi representing agricultural scenes which occasionally formed part of the decoration of the halls of Egyptian tombs. Here and there rose villages or farms, the lines of whose sloping, earth-gray walls recalled the substructures of antique temples.
As for the palace of Tiberius, not one of its stones can be seen; its remains lie buried beneath a lovely public garden; whilst of the neighbouring palace of Caligula, overhanging the Forum, there are only some huge substructures, akin to those of the house of Severus buttresses, lofty arcades, which upheld the palace, vast basements, so to say, where the praetorians were posted and gorged themselves with continual junketings.
There was here a stretch of ground littered with materials, an extraordinary chaos of building stone, beams and machinery; and pending the time when an army of navvies would come to set the whole place in order, one could see gaping trenches, rough flights of descending steps and fences, imperfectly closing doorways which conducted to the substructures of the basilica.
And so not only city walls but substructures in general and all walls that require a thickness like that of a city wall, will be long in falling to decay if tied in this manner.
Professor Lanciani, who is probably the greatest authority, living or dead, on Roman antiquities, places the site of the temple of the Sun in the Colonna gardens, and another writer compares the latter to the hanging gardens of Babylon, supported entirely on ancient arches and substructures rising high above the natural soil below.
From the point of view of the special study on which we are now busy, the inhabited and visible part of an Assyrian building is less interesting than those channels hidden in the substructures which acted as drains. These channels existed in all the palaces.
Standing by the port deadlight, I spotted magnificent coral substructures, zoophytes, algae, and crustaceans with enormous quivering claws that stretched forth from crevices in the rock. At 10:15 Captain Nemo himself took the helm. Dark and deep, a wide gallery opened ahead of us. The Nautilus was brazenly swallowed up. Strange rumblings were audible along our sides.
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