Domus Tiberiana

The Domus Tiberiana in Rome, Italy, is an imperial Roman palace begun in the first century CE and associated with the emperor Tiberius. Constructed in the early imperial period, the building formed a core residence on the northwest corner of the Palatine Hill and later served as a focus for successive emperors’ building campaigns. Over centuries the complex grew, burned, was rebuilt, and changed function, making it a principal part of the imperial landscape of Rome.

Before the imperial palace rose here, excavations show a Republican‑era house set on a high podium beneath the western end of the later complex, demonstrating occupation of the site before the emperors. Tiberius built an ornate residence that provided the base upon which his successors expanded.

During the reigns of Caligula and Claudius the house was enlarged. Caligula extended the palace toward the Forum and converted the Temple of Castor and Pollux into an entry vestibule, and behind that temple masonry remains and a large rectangular pool appear within a court. Nero’s rule saw further enlargement and, after the great fire of AD 64, Nero remodeled the palace and folded it into his larger Domus Aurea complex, adding a buttressed perimeter wall to enclose the assorted dwellings.

A second destructive fire in AD 80 damaged the Neronian structures. The emperor Domitian rebuilt and enlarged the palace, attaching it as an annex to his principal residence and adding features such as a long covered gallery with a marble parapet, a reconfigured entrance hall behind the Temple of Castor and Pollux, and a sequence of ramps up the hill. A building to the east of the vestibule originally identified as guards’ quarters was later converted into the church of Santa Maria Antiqua.

Trajan and Hadrian carried out further alterations. Hadrian extended the substructures northward, covering part of the nearby roadway known as the Clivus Victoriae and reaching the Via Nova, and he raised arcaded support works on which the palace’s expanded summit rooms rested. In the second century the complex became associated with imperial heirs; during the Antonine period the residence appears to have housed designated successors, and a library within the palace held the imperial archives, serving as a repository after the libraries of the Temple of Apollo burned in AD 80.

A major fire under Commodus gutted the Domus Tiberiana and destroyed the library archives. The palace was repaired afterwards and continued to function as an official residence. Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire control of the property passed through the hands of the authorities who occupied Rome between the fifth and eighth centuries. In the eighth century Pope John VII lived in the palace. In the medieval period the site was abandoned and its materials were widely removed; it later became an orchard. In 1550 Cardinal Alessandro Farnese transformed the terraces into the Farnese Gardens, creating what contemporary accounts describe as an early private botanical garden. Systematic archaeological work began in the eighteenth century and continued with major investigations in the nineteenth century and further finds into the twenty‑first century.