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What all of this does for Caligula’s seemingly irredeemable reputation is an open question. “It is not hard to imagine animals, some caged and some running wild, in this enchanted setting.” The science of antiquities department of the Sapienza University of Rome collaborated on the project. “The ruins tell extraordinary stories, starting with the animals,” said Mirella Serlorenzi, the culture ministry’s director of excavations. The dig, carried out beneath the rubble of a condemned 19th-century apartment complex, yielded gems, coins, ceramics, jewelry, pottery, cameo glass, a theater mask, seeds of plants such as citron, apricot and acacia that had been imported from Asia, and bones of peacocks, deer, lions, bears and ostriches.
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But this spring, Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism will open the Nymphaeum Museum of Piazza Vittorio, a subterranean gallery that will showcase a section of the imperial garden that was unearthed during an excavation from 2006 to 2015. Historians have long believed that the remains of the lavish houses and parkland would never be recovered. An early version of a wildlife park, the Horti Lamiani featured orchards, fountains, terraces, a bath house adorned with precious colored marble from all over the Mediterranean, and exotic animals, some of which were used, as in the Colosseum, for private circus games. There, just on the edge of the city, villas, shrines and banquet halls were set in carefully constructed “natural” landscapes. The vast residential compound spread out on the Esquiline Hill, one of the seven hills on which the city was originally built, in the area around the current Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II. As reported by Suetonius, the Michael Wolff of ancient Rome, he never forgot a slight, slept only a few hours a night and married several times, lastly to a woman named Milonia.ĭuring the four years that Caligula occupied the Roman throne, his favorite hideaway was an imperial pleasure garden called Horti Lamiani, the Mar-a-Lago of its day. The fourth of the 12 Caesars, Caligula - officially, Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus - was a capricious, combustible first-century populist remembered, perhaps unfairly, as the empire’s most tyrannical ruler.