It was built between 125 and 134 A.D.  to the South-West of Tivoli by Emperor Hadrian, as his imperial residence outside Rome, and covers an area (80/120 hectares) greater than Pompei .
More than just a villa, what the emperor featured in Margherite Yourcenar’s famous novel “The Memoirs of Hadrian” had built was a “global museum” of antiquity. A restless intellectual character, fickle and adventurous, a lover of travel and multi-ethnicity, as well as being passionate about architecture, Hadrian, (masterfully impersonated by Giorgio Albertazzi every summer right among the vlla’s ruins) called in expert artists who under his supervision reconstructed monuments inspired by the many he had seen during the course of his travels throughout the known world of the time.
Among the most famous is the Canopus, reminiscent of the Egyptian city by the same name and the long canal that connected it to Alexandria. It is a pool of water surrounded by porticoes and lawns which ends in a large exedra shaped nymphaeum, probably used for outdoor banqueting; the Pecile, a monumental four-sided portico that encloses a garden with a central pool, the Lyceum, the Prytaneum, the Academy and the Tempe Valley.
In the residential sectors and in the Villa’s pavilions on the other hand there were picture galleries featuring philosophers and emperors arranged according to a precise design which included architectural solutions, furnishings and even landscaping. A word of mention goes to Hadrian’s private “shelter”, the Maritime Theatre, equipped with a small thermal bath system for his moments of relax. It stands on its own artificial circular island, connected to the mainland by a small masonry bridge. Of course there was also a hippodrome and a stadium.
Having been included among the monuments of the Unesco World Heritage Fund in 1999, the Villa Adriana shares with may other famous archaeological sites the paradox of being known and excavated for over five hundred years, despite being in actual fact unknown. After many years of magnificence, the Villa was sacked of its treasures and it knew many centuries of oblivion, during which it became “Old Tivoli”, reduced to a mere brick and marble quarry for the nearby town of Tivoli, an important bishoprick. Only at the end of the 15th C. did archaeologists identify it once again as the Emperor Hadrian’s Villa mentioned in the Historia Augusta, and at the same time Pope Alexander VI Borgia initiated the first excavations at the Odeon, which led to the discovery of the “Seated Muse” statues currently in the Prado Museum in Madrid.
During the Eighteenth Century, Villa Adriana became a fundamental stop on the rich English noblemen’s Grand Tour, and they were prepared to pay any sum to be able to exhibit statues and vases from the villa in their own homes, as a kind of precious travel trophy. One such particularly active English antiquarian and art merchant was Gavin Hamilton, whose excavations of the Pantanello area, along with Domenico De Angelis from Tivoli, led to the discovery of an enormous quantity of statues. Only at the end of the 19th C., after many changes in ownership and subdivisions was the Villa partially acquired by the Italian State and restoration works could begin in earnest.

Galleria fotografica