Many of the original decorations from the Golden Palace have been lost or moved to museums, but it is still incredible to wander through the chambers that are now underground.Ī tour of the Domus Aurea is a great rainy day activity since it is all inside, but a walk through the Golden Palace is also perfect in summer. Having this virtual reality stop was incredibly helpful (and a lot of fun). I like Ancient Roman history, but I find it really hard to picture what everything looked like based on the ruins. There is a virtual reality experience that helps to animate what the Golden Palace would have looked like.I had no idea that the Domus Aurea was right there under the hill.Which is why part of the reason I loved this visit so much was because: He spared no expensive – even decorating the ceilings with mosaics and building an elaborate rotating dome. In addition to landscaped gardens and a manmade lake, Nero built grottos and dining rooms for his guests to relax in. Nero’s Golden Palace was made up of more than 200 rooms, and some have yet to be reopened.ĭespite its impressive size, they have yet to find any bedrooms or sleeping quarters – this huge complex was all about entertainment. The Domus Aurea is very much an excavation in process. Prepped and ready to explore, we grabbed our yellow hats and followed an archaeologist into the site. We met with our guide, Brandon, to chat about Nero and learn more about his Golden Palace. He then went on to build the Colosseum on top of the artificial lake which Nero had built inside his palace walls.īuried under Colle Oppio, the Golden Palace was nearly lost – but it is now possible to visit the excavation site.īut because there are ongoing excavations taking place, you are going to need a tour (I went with Through Eternity tours) and a hard hat. Vespasian, the emperor who succeeded Nero, had the palace filled with dirt and destroyed. Most of it lies under Colle Oppio park, looking out at the Colosseum. The Domus Aurea covered somewhere between 100 and 300 acres, reaching from the touching the slopes of the Palatine, Esquiline, Oppian and Caelian hills. To say that his palace was massive is a bit of an understatement. It was probably this lavish display that cemented Nero’s unpopularity. After the embers died down, he used the “new” space left empty by the inferno to build his Domus Aurea – Nero’s Golden Palace.

It’s not clear if he really celebrated the destruction of the city in real time, but he certainly took advantage of the fire. The emperor supposedly played the fiddle while Rome burned. There are few figures in Roman history as well known and reviled as Nero.

Golden palace hours