Domus Transitoria

The Domus Transitoria was Nero’s first palace in Rome, and its name, the house of passage, records its purpose. By the middle of the first century AD the imperial house held property across the city: the Horti Maecenatis on the Esquiline, the Horti Lamiani and Lolliani nearby, and older residences on the Palatine. Horti were park-scale estates with pavilions, terraces, and sculpture. Nero built a single structure to link them, and Tacitus describes it as the building by which the emperor had joined the Palatine to the Horti Maecenatis (Annals 15.39). The fire of July 64 destroyed it, and the Domus Aurea took its place.

What survives lies beneath the state apartments of Domitian‘s palace on the Palatine. When the Domus Aurea was built after the fire, its foundations were driven down through the burnt rooms, breaking the earlier walls and floors; Domitian later built over both. Farnese excavators reached these rooms in 1720 and stripped much of the marble. An early account called the complex a bath suite, and the label Baths of Livia stuck for two centuries. The identification with Nero’s first palace was proposed in 1929, and stratigraphy and construction technique support it. The name and its extent remain debated, the sources read either as one palace or as a chain of buildings and horti joined by passages.

Excavations between 1912 and 1914 exposed the plan. Two flights of white marble stairs descend into a sunken courtyard. One side carries a nymphaeum, a fountain conceived as monumental architecture, divided into niches; the central niche fed a cascade that drove jets of water before a low platform faced with colored columns. Opposite stood a colonnaded pavilion where the emperor and his guests reclined, facing the water. Rooms on either side had floors and walls inlaid in a four-color scheme associated with Neronian workshops, each stone from a different province: yellow giallo antico from North Africa, red porphyry from the Egyptian desert, green porphyry from the Peloponnese, and pavonazzetto, white veined with purple, from Asia Minor. Such a floor advertised imperial reach as much as private wealth.

The painted vaults are the most important surviving evidence for painting at Nero’s court. They imitate a coffered ceiling, with red beams framing panels of Homeric and Trojan subjects among fine grotesque ornament, and were inlaid with glass paste and semiprecious stones. Identified in 1912 beneath the Flavian triclinium and detached in 1956, they are now in the Palatine Museum. One proposal assigns them to Famulus, named by the encyclopedist Pliny the Elder as the principal painter of the Golden House (Natural History 35.120). One room holds an Amazonomachy, a battle between Greeks and Amazons that ancient art used to figure the defeat of an eastern enemy. The scene has been connected with Nero’s Armenian campaign. It has also been read as decoration, since the Dionysiac and Muse friezes in these rooms are the standard repertoire of a Roman banqueting suite.

Excavation diaries record that the marble steps showed no wear, suggesting a few years of use at most. The rooms survive because they were buried: Domitian filled in the lower level and rebuilt above it on a single story, sealing Nero’s courtyard beneath his own floors.

FURTHER READING

1. Varner, Eric R. Golden Excess: Art and the Aesthetics of the Incredible in Neronian Rome. Vol. 76. Brill, 2025.
2. Gurgone, Federico, and Marco Ansaloni. “Golden House of an Emperor.” Archaeology, vol. 68, no. 5, 2015, pp. 37–43. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43825196. Accessed 31 July 2026.
3. Ball, Larry F. The Domus Aurea and the Roman architectural revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
4. Hemsoll, David. “Reconstructing the Octagonal Dining Room of Nero’s Golden House.” Architectural History, vol. 32, 1989, pp. 1–17. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1568558. Accessed 31 July 2026.