Heres the view from our window as the sun came down last night…
The hotel has a pizzeria & restaurant downstairs which is also the breakfast room.
We started the day with a tour to see Hadrians Villa. We had a great guide and a small group – it was one of the best days of our trip.
Its the largest private residence ever built in the world – built by Hadrian, this map shows the entire estate of 120 hectares and 30 buildings.
This lovely pool area, it has fish in it, had 200 marble columns up each side. As many were destroyed hey have planted the round pines shaped like columns to show what it would have been like originally, so each of half sized pines would have been a tall marble column.
This view looks back toward Rome.
These tall hollow areas were for grain storage.
The left side of this pic below shows part of the road to the villa and underneath that dark shadow there is another road. There were 3000 slaves working at the villa and they were kept underground with tunnels and a separate road underneath this one, so that they could move about the villa and not be seen. Only those who had to come up to perform their duties saw daylight – the ultimate ‘Upstairs – Downstairs’!
This olive tree is over a thousand years old.
(running out of time and internet). we spent the morning here and then headed off to lunch at a lovely outdoor restaurant at Tivoli.
This is a link to a virtual tour of Hadrians villa which explains more of the history behind the Villa & Hadrian and what the building were.