|
 Dwight Peck's personal website
A month's sojourn in Italy,
Oct.-Nov. 2024
You may not find this terribly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.
A visit to the Sanctuary of Hercules Victor (1)
7 November 2024
Still another fine day dawns, and we're off to find the Santuario di Ercole Vincitore, the Sanctuary of Hercules Victor, but first . . .
. . . we'll have a look round the Choco Italia festival in the Piazza Garibaldi. Not too well attended yet, but the day is young.
We hope that huge throngs of chocoholics show up and get this worthy cause off the ground.
(Not that we particularly care about chocolates ourselves.)
We'll start down the hill now.
That surely does look like a genuine della Robbia from the 15th and early 16th century family that invented and specialized in a technique of polychrome tin-glazed terracotta statuary. It's everywhere.
We're bound down the hill a ways to the western side of the medieval centre overlooking the river on that side.
Passing the San Pietro alla Carità church . . .
. . . which is still closed up tight.
Helpful stairways for the credenti, coursing along the outer walls of the Villa d'Este gardens on the right.
And still more stairways
Hurtling down the Via Campitelli in this . . .
. . . fascinating old neighborhood.
We're certainly permitted at this point to wonder where we are, and where we're going.
This interesting little squiggle in the road is actually quite important, because there on the left . . .
. . . is the landmark Casa Gotica, or Gothic House, from the 14th century (evidently not much altered).
Soon we're down onto the Via del Colle, passing downhill out of town, and immediately confronted with the Chiesa di San Silvestro, dated to the 11th and 12th centuries.
An admirable simplicity, though the walls of the nave don't look entirely unimproved. We're told that there were originally a nave and two aisles with a double row of 12 cipolin marble columns, but in the 12th century the aisles were walled up and the columns sold off. At some point later, the left aisle was pulled down in order to widen the Via del Colle.
An interesting juxtaposition of the ancient and more modern
But the apse is a right wonder in its own self.
The frescoes from the 12th century decorating the triumphal arch and the apse represent the legend of the Emperor Constantine and St Sylvester.
Sylvester I (285-335) was the Bishop of Rome from 314 to his death and was responsible for the building of many large churches, including in Rome the St John Lateran and Old St Peter's Basilica, and seems to have been involved in Constantine's baptism. In later years, he was fictionally embroidered into the forged stories of Constantine having gifted the Bishop of Rome with the concept of the 'papal supremacy' over all other bishops.
-- Okay, okay, let's move along.
Just outside the church, that's the Fontana monumentale di San Silvestro.
And another Gothic House
These are called on Google Maps the ‘Group of the so-called Byzantine Houses’, described by the local guide Roberto Cecchini as presently renovated into B+Bs but originally dated either from the 6th century Gothic War or [more likely] named by inhabitants at some point who knew that they were very old. He writes that some of the architectural elements suggest that there could have been a building of worship in there, and there’s a vestigial fresco.
Here we go. The Sanctuary of Hercules Victor was an innovative engineering project begun between 120 and 82 BC on a wave of Hellenistic cultural influences on Rome following its conquest of Greece in 146 BC. Tibur, now Tivoli, was on the path of the important Via Tiburtina used by commercial and transhumance livestock travelers passing over the mountains to the towns on the Adriatic, and it had long collected tolls for its bridge over the Aniene river. After the town came under Roman administrative control, however, that was no longer possible – so they gave up on the tolls and arranged that the road up from Rome ran up through the sanctuary, thus everyone passing through could make a suitable obligatory tithe offering to the divinity.
New museum facilities -- we'll start there. Back in the day, travelers could proceed up the Via Tecta, or covered path or tunnel, which was covered over in 89 BC, and reach the bridge farther up the Via del Colle (or hill). As the traffic increased over time, camps were set up for wagons and herds, and facilities for pilgrims and traders were increasingly added. Eventually, throughout the complex under the sanctuary itself, there were warehouses, stables, inns and lodging, banks, schools, shops, factories of ex-voto offerings, and so on. And as Tivoli began to draw Roman elites to establish second homes here, the wealthy newcomers were often anxious to make donations to the god (and his priests), both to get lucky and to gain prestige.
A museum in the making. The ruins of the ancient sanctuary, after the outlawing of pagan worship in the Empire by Theodosius in AD 391, as they declined began to be repurposed, first as Christian churches, later as monasteries, and by the 17th century for industrial structures, water mills, a papal armory, developing the local waterfalls and channels in time into a foundry, a wool mill, and eventually in 1886 as Italy's first hydroelectric power station capable of transferring alternating current over a long distance, making Tivoli the first electrified city in Italy, followed by Rome in 1892 with power sent down from here.
Even prior to the Codex Theodosianus of 391, the sanctuary had been victimized by raids, often by bands of monks from Subiaco who went about destroying pagan shrines and temples.
Most recently a paper mill was here, decommissioned in the 1950s. But the cultural value of the site had been recognized, and in 2008 restoration and improvements were begun, especially of the theatre. The sanctuary complex was opened to the public in 2011, and both restoration work and new excavations (evidently) are continuing.
Whilst we were passing through here, a young lady was hard at work mounting a photographic exhibition on one of the walls.
That's not one of hers.
This is an early interpretation of what the five story sanctuary might have looked like, with a comparative photo of the remains.
This is a model reconstruction (by Giuseppe Isoldi) of the sanctuary complex with its five stories. The sanctuary itself, on the upper floors, comprises the Triportico, or three-side colonnaded courtyard with porticos, the podium or temple of the god's cult (the sacred temenos), and the theatre, with administrative and religious spaces and lots and lots of sculptures of gods and local benefactors. The lower stories include the Via Tiburtina passing through on a diagonal, here covered as the Via Tecta for 150 metres (of which 55m remain), a vaulted gallery flanked by warehouses and other facilities (called grottoni) throughout the terrace dug out of the hillside.
A view along the northern façade, showing three levels of the complex. The ruins here were long believed to have been from the Villa of Maecenas, a close advisor to Emperor Augustus (70 BC - 8 BC), and it was only in the 19th century that archaeologists finally identified it as the Sanctuary of Hercules Victor.
The early Tiburtini venerated the cult of Hercules as a warrior god (Invictus) who ensured their victory over the Italic Aequi tribe from farther up in the mountains, and as the protector of trade and flocks. It was one of the most important cults throughout Latium; the Greeks revered their Herakles as a semi-god, but the Italic Hercules was usually considered a deity.
A work in progress
We're leaving the upper museum area for a tour of the grounds.
This awkward metal-trussed roof has apparently been left behind by the Segrè paper mill, which went out of business in the 1950s.
The metal roofing was apparently replacing the long-lost roof of a 5th level portico walkway with large arches that ran along the rear of the triportico just behind the temple itself (see model above). We'll go through there a little later.
This large open space, which was once part of the triportico of the sanctuary, was inhabited in medieval times by monastic communities that farmed and grazed on the land here.
This monastic use continued and was supported in the 16th century when the gardens of the Villa d'Este were created by leveling the slope of the hill above and transferring a lot of surplus earth down onto this expanse.
As nearly as we can guess, that metal structure may be intended to demonstrate the original dimensions of the sanctuary temple. In which case, it's an inspired idea, but we could find no explanations of it online.
That (to our surprise) is the Villa d'Este and its gardens just up the hill.
Looking down the other day from that vantage, we were wondering wildly what those little structures were for. We had no idea that they were part of the Hercules Sanctuary, and in fact, they really weren't. The little pillars were supports, made from existing material lying round from the sanctuary, for pergolas or trellises for cultivating the Tivoli grape called pizzutello.
Still within the expanse of the sanctuary's triportico, this is the original theatre, which apparently backed up (according to the model above) within a few meters of the stairway up to the sacred temple.
How not to get lost.
The customary theatre within the sanctuary precincts formerly was facing a portico building behind the stage and orchestra (remains seen below on the left), but it's now giving views of the countryside below along the river.
Just below the theatre, and outside the original sanctuary, that is the Tempio delle Tosse, or Temple of the Cough, apparently built in the early 4th century alongside the Via Tiburtina on the ruins of a 1st century BC villa. In the 10th century, we're told, it was converted into a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, restored with material from the ruined Hercules Sanctuary. It's now on private property and can't be visited, supposedly 'undergoing restoration' with no sign that this might be true.
The name 'Tosse' may be derived from a local family name, but the medieval hypothesis that it was dedicated to the goddess or Madonna of 'the Cough' to keep the disease away from the population is considered fanciful.
This old wreck, which looks like a late 18th century textile factory in Manchester, is evidently part of an industrial something-or-other from a time when many enterprises were developing in this era, to benefit from the copious water sources coming off the river's progress through the fissured limestone landscape.
That said, the smaller building on the right, with its apparent rose window and small tower, looks like it might be an abandoned church, but we've found no mention of that.
The theatre was built between 80 and 70 BC onto the hilly slope just below the leveled triportico; it's estimated to have been able to seat 3,000 spectators and was presumably part of the temple experience.
That thing is the Torretta Canevari, housing a 'vertical pressure conduit' to convey water from the Canevari Canal to the turbines below, the first such power plant in Italy. The Canal, completed in 1892, passes through the temple, crosses the Via Tecta, and continues down along a perimeter wall, diverting water from the 'Waterfalls of Maecenas' into fixed conduits. The use of the Canal was superseded by the expansion in 1920 of the new power plant built in 1902 at the river level below.
This appears to be (at least more or less) the route of the Via Tiburtina up the last slope (the clivus tiburtinus) to the sanctuary . . .
. . . where it enters the tunnel-like Via Tecta. But first we'll have a look into some of the workrooms of the museum in that white building.
Hard at work
This is apparently a great find, brought in from some other site, a set of pieces illustrating the fate of Niobe, mentioned in the Iliad, whose children were murdered by Apollo and Artemis on the orders of Leto on account of her hubris.
Now . . . into the Via Tecta.
Next up: A visit to the Sanctuary of Hercules Victor, part two
 
 Feedback
and suggestions are welcome if positive, resented if negative,  .
All rights reserved, all wrongs avenged. Posted 2 March 2025.
|
