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Monday, June 25, 2012

Il Canopo, Villa d'Adriano, Tivoli

Speranza



Adriano's immense, sprawling villa, almost the size of a town with its libraries, small baths, great baths, Marine Theatre, stadium, swimming pools, Philosopher's Hall, courtyards and colonnades, is a monument to his passion for touring his Empire.

Adriano named the various buildings and their landscape setting after places in Grecia which had given him particular pleasure:

The Lyceum
The Academia,
The Prytaneum,
the Stoa Poikile -- at Athens.

-- The Value of Tempe in Thessaly, and the Canopo, a famous Alexandrian canal leading to the temple of Serapis.

Adriano never seeked to reproduce these places, only to recall them to memory.

The Canopo is the only part of the villa where the original name can be applied with some certainty.

For Addriano, the cult of Serapis, whose sanctuary stood at the end of the real Canopo, was more than  a whim.

The oracle of Serapis had promised him a long life on condition that a youth died for him, and Antino is supposed to have offered his life as a sacrifice to his benefactor.

The Canopo has now been restored to its state.

The marble colonnade is exquisitely graceful.

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