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VILLA ADRIANA - THE WINTER PALACE

The Winter Palace, also known as the Building with Cryptoporticus and Fish Pond, is one of the most imposing and complex buildings in Villa Adriana and still has three different floors.

The lower floor is on the same level as the Poecile and the Garden Stadium, which it overlooked with large windows; there were two access stairs to access it from below. Once it was possible to enter inside the building, visiting the various rooms and climbing the stairs that lead to the upper floor. Today everything is closed. The large central room on the lower floor was restored in the 1990s, raising the collapsed vault.

The intermediate floor still has a grandiose Cryptoporticus with four large corridors, that gives the building its name, whose splayed windows took light from an external walkway that surrounded the large Fish Pond.

The Cryptoporticus was a sheltered place where it was possible to walk indoors in winter and in the cool in summer. On its vaults the signatures of ancient scholars and visitors can be seen, including that of Giovan Battista Piranesi dating 1741. The Cryptoporticus has been closed to the public for more than ten years, despite being one of the most spectacular and unique places in the Villa.

On that same intermediate level there was a separate access path, which led to the winter heating systems of the upper floor. Since this was not a thermal building, the heating system was a real luxury, and shows that this was the Winter Palace, where the emperor stayed during the cold season.

The upper floor of the Winter Palace was heated: the floors of colored and precious marble, of which some examples remain, rested on the suspensurae, small brick columns that created a cavity in which the hot air circulated to heat the rooms.
There are still very high, imposing rooms, once richly decorated, because the building was part of the Imperial Residence, which was reserved for the emperor together with the Building with Three Exedras (also partly heated) the Garden Stadium, the Quadriporticus and the Small Baths, as explained in the specific section on our Villa Adriana website.

As always happens in the noble buildings of Villa Adriana, the walls were also covered with marble panels, whose design can be partially reconstructed based on the holes for the metal clamps that hold them to the wall. The ceiling of another room still has parts of a fresco with bright colors.

The imperial buildings of the Villa, in addition to being monumental and scenographic, had panoramic qualities: from the upper floor of the Winter Palace the view extended all around, towards the Pecile, the Nymphaeum Stadium and the Building with Three Exedras. And also towards the Canopus and the rest of the Villa.

The upper floor of the Winter Palace also communicated with a magnificent Hanging Garden, from which one could ascend to another important building of the Villa, the Praetorium Panoramic Pavilion, which we will talk about on another occasion.

Find out more about the Winter Palace in the area about the Buildings of Villa Adriana

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