Hadrian’s Villa between heaven and earth: A tour with Marguerite Yourcenar

titolo originale: Villa Adriana tra cielo e terra

The tour of Hadrian’s Villa, with Marguerite Yourcenar’s texts as guide, is the result of research based on “a direct rapport with things”, as Zeno writes in The Abyss. Research inspired by my familiarity with Villa Adriana and motivated by a desire to get to know and care for the buildings and the open spaces that blend into a harmonious whole with the sky and with their natural surroundings.
Some locations in the Villa have caused me to reflect on life, death, and immortality, on the Villa’s relation to the city of Rome, which can be discerned on the horizon, and to the rest of the known world and its inhabitants; on the journeys which, as well as allowing the exploration of the Empire in every direction, also represent many stages in self-reflection and inner life so typical of the stoic tradition. Moreover, some buildings call to mind other Roman buildings connected with Hadrian, such as the Pantheon and Castel Sant’Angelo, to which I have dedicated a few passages.
Hadrian’s interest in the stars, in the phenomena and objects of the sky, in the movement of celestial bodies, studied by the astronomers of the period, is testified by the Emperor’s two biographers, Spartianus and Cassius Dio, from whom Marguerite Yourcenar has widely drawn. It is the theme that has inspired the choices of extracts and the stages of the tour that follows.