Description
The House of Livia is a small home on the Palatine, next to the House of Augustus, with painted walls that are still easy to make out. Its rooms were frescoed around 30 BC, when Rome was becoming an empire.
The highlight is the tablinum, the room that joined the two parts of the house: painted columns on a podium and a fake coffered ceiling create a depth that isn't there. In the middle of the right-hand wall, Io guarded by Argus waits for Mercury, who is coming to free her: it's a copy of a famous Greek painting.
In another room, garlands of fruit run along the walls with a yellow frieze of Egyptian scenes, painted in quick strokes like a sketch.
The name comes from a lead pipe found in the 1869 excavations, inscribed “Iulia Aug(usta)”, one of the names of Livia, the wife of Augustus. Rather than a house of its own, it was perhaps her apartment inside her husband's residence.
The highlight is the tablinum, the room that joined the two parts of the house: painted columns on a podium and a fake coffered ceiling create a depth that isn't there. In the middle of the right-hand wall, Io guarded by Argus waits for Mercury, who is coming to free her: it's a copy of a famous Greek painting.
In another room, garlands of fruit run along the walls with a yellow frieze of Egyptian scenes, painted in quick strokes like a sketch.
The name comes from a lead pipe found in the 1869 excavations, inscribed “Iulia Aug(usta)”, one of the names of Livia, the wife of Augustus. Rather than a house of its own, it was perhaps her apartment inside her husband's residence.