By Max Parini
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August 20, 2020
The foundation of Tivoli is much older than Rome and dates back to 1.215 BC. According to the myth, it was Catillo the Greek who created this small colony which in book VII of the Aeneid was defined as "Superbum". Certainly Tivoli today is known for the two Unesco heritage sites: Villa Adriana and Villa d'Este, but few remember it for the Mausoleum of Plauti, immortalized by Ettore Roesler Franz, or for the so-called Temple of the Sibyl that dominates the ravine sculpted by the copious waterfall that the Aniene river has drawn, or for the tomb of the vestal Cossinia, or for the temple of Hercules so grandiose as to be compared in importance to the temple of Fortuna Primigenia of Palestrina and visited several times by the god Augustus during his reign . Tivoli is the city where the man of letters and humanist Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who became Pope in 1,458 with the name of Pius II, had a defensive fortress built so imposing that it still dominates the landscape of the city center, a fortress whose name is precisely Pia. in his honour. Four of the aqueducts of Rome pass through Tivoli and the abundance of water, the amenity of the place, the presence of springs of sulphurous waters convinced the emperor Hadrian that Tivoli was the best place to live there and give vent to his talent as an architect, in the meantime, keeping away from the Senate of Rome, the first cause of the "premature" death of many of his fellow emperors. The villa recreated on a scale the places and towns that most left their mark on Hadrian's cultured sensibility: the Serapeum and the Canopus recalled Egypt; the Pecile recalled Athens and Greece; the academy, the Greek and Latin theater, Roccabruna generally recalled all the suggestions received in the many journeys he made in his twenty-one years of reign. Twenty-one years spent traveling to get to know the empire to the most hidden passages, to know its peoples, to listen to their voices, to quell where necessary, revolts like that of the Jews between 132 AD. and 135 A.D. to secure the borders by building works such as the Wall in Britain. A man who made his residence in Tivoli the materialization of a universalistic idea of Rome as a dispenser of order, peace and culture, which was opposed by the senators, who harbored strong resentments against a prince who held power firmly in his hands isolating what remained of the Senate, that is the ancient memory of an integrity no longer worthily represented by its members. Adriano loved culture in all its forms, he loved mystery religions and magical-religious practices that evoked life after death, so in his villa he created monuments that astronomically oriented, on particular days of the year, produced surreal games of light evoking, for example, the return of Osiris from the underworld. Why did Osiris and Isis arouse the emperor's religious interest? Osiris, the civilizer and benefactor king of archaic Egypt, drowned in the Nile because of his evil brother Seth who dismembered his body, but Isis brought him back to life thanks to her magical arts and Osiris became the god of the kingdom of the dead. The death by drowning of Antinous in the Nile led Hadrian to associate Antinous with Osiris, so much so that he represented him as the Egyptian god and dedicated a shrine to him in the Villa Adriana called Antinoeion, identified only during the excavations in 2002. It is believed to have identified an exedra that it circumscribed the area in the center of which was placed the obelisk of the Pincio dedicated to Antinous, obelisk "watched over" by two temples compared to each other and dedicated to Osiris and his son Harpocrates. According to recent studies, on the days of the solstice the sun lined up along the temples and the obelisk cast its shadow, perhaps, on the tomb of Antinous
