Lake Nemi was sacred to the virgin goddess Diana, huntress and protector of childbirth the remains of her shrine have only been partially excavated.  The moon is associated with her and the lake is called Speculum Dianae (Diana’s Mirror) – it particularly captivated the poets and composers who made their homes here.

The Roman emperors recreated naval battles known as  Naumachie on nearby Lake Albano, a form of gladiatorial spectacle involving killing and actual sinkings. When they found submerged boats on Lake Nemi in the 1930s they were presumed to be pleasure boats rather than warships as Lake Nemi was a sacred lake. They were raised and a museum built, but sadly they were destroyed by accident during WW2.

Section of ancient Roman wall in Diana’s shrine, showing ‘opus reticulatum’ and brickwork

Diana’s altar, still in use by modern adherents to her cult, offerings of fruit, prayers and candles.

Nemi is also associated with the myth of Rex Nemorensis, the story of which begins and ends James Frazer’s famous work of anthropology, The Golden Bough (1890). The story goes that the high priest of the shrine at Nemi to Diana, achieved the role through mortal combat with his predecessor; he in turn would be slain by his successor, and so on through the ages. As Macaulay put it:

Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.

The contender had first to prove his metal by plucking a golden bough (most likely mistletoe growing on the sacred oak) from Diana’s Grove, thus the origin of the legend. Recently, archeologists discovered the fossilised remains of an oak within the sanctuary. Cannabis was cultivated on the shores in ancient times and may have been involved in sacred rituals.

statue of Diana in Nemi village

Nemi, the main street

Strawberries both wild and cultivated

Patrick holds up the famous bread, baked in wood-fired ovens, in nearby Genzano (with a wild boar sausage necklace).

Nemi on the distant hill and Lake Nemi in 1831

A fanciful view of Lake Nemi in The Golden Bough by JMW Turner (1834)

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The most notable building is the edifice commonly known as The Colosseo Quadrato (Square Colosseum) designed as part of the EUR project in 1938. It is officially called The Palace of Italian Civilisation and was designed for the 1942 World’s Fair that was cancelled in 1941 following Mussolini’s declaration of war on Britain and France in 1940. It was not completed till 1953. The frame is reinforced concrete clad with Travertine limestone. Atop the building incised in giant letters are the words from a speech Mussolini made in 1935, ” A people of poets, artists, heroes, saints, thinkers, scientists, navigators, migrants.” No one could take issue with this list.

One of the Dioscuri statues, either Castor or Pollux

The statuary, in Carrara marble, was added from 1942 on. The statues in the arches on the ground floor, represent trades, arts and sciences, while the four equines represent the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux. Although the building has featured in numerous films to illustrate solid Italian clerical-conservatism, I find it an extraordinary radical style of architecture rooted in the classical past. It is also most photogenic in any season or light.

The Flaminia Bridge,  Ponte Flaminio

The Flaminia Bridge was started in 1938, damaged in WW II and not completed till 1951. It features in the 1993 film Dear Diary, and the left-wing director Nanni Moretti is vociferous in his love for the architecture – despite its Fascist origins. The architect, Armando Brasini was popular with the fascist regime and would have demolished large swathes of central Rome as part of a Le Corbusier-style planning revolution in the late 1920s if he had had his way. He was responsible for the architecture and urban planning in various parts of Mussolini’s empire such as Tripoli and Tirana, Albania. He designed many remarkable buildings, but worked little after the war. His grandson lives in Orvieto.

The Fascist Eagle on the Flaminia Bridge

I will publish more posts shortly about Rome’s architecture.

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The Rome workshop started on the first day with a visit to The Vatican a short walk from our B&B in Prati. We arrived at St Peter’s at 9 to avoid the crowds and only had to queue for the metal detectors for about 10 minutes.

The Bernini columns like embracing arms either side of St Peter’s Basilica

St Peter’s Basilica so impressive, the cost of construction so huge, that the church resorted to selling indulgences, a practice that  was to so upset a young monk, Martin Luther that he nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenburg church – the first volley of the Reformation.

The Bernini Baldachin reputedly stands over St Peter’s tomb

Some of the most notable architects and artists of the age contributed to its design: Bramante, Sangallo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Bernini to name just a few; while some of the great surviving buildings of Ancient Rome contributed materials: the Colosseum half demolished to provide stone, marble stripped from various thermal baths, and the bronze from the Pantheon portico used to build Bernini’s Baldachin over the altar

under the papal crossed keys a mother suffers the pains of childbirth beneath the Baldachin

One of the curiosities of St Peter’s is this series of sculpted faces of a woman. Each column  has a pedestal with the Barberini coat of arms (Urban VIII) above which is visible a mother undergoing the progressive pains of childbirth; the eighth and last is a cherub. Could this curious and not to mention out of place series be an analogy not to the nine months, but the nine years it took Bernini to realise the monument?

Vatican superstar: Michelangelo’s Pietà

The undeniable superstar is Michelangelo’s Pietà, the only work of art that the modest artist ever signed, and subsequently regretted, in marked contrast to the popes themselves who put their names, and often coats of arms, everywhere. Sadly the vandalisation by a maniac in 1972 means it is impossible to approach the sculpture. Mary’s nose was hammered off and replaced with a marble transplant from her back. The Pietà was designed as a monument for a French cardinal and belongs to a northern European rather than Italian tradition. David’s iconic painting Morte de Marat lying stabbed in his bathtub was modelled upon it.

narrow stairs to the cupola

As we climbed the stairs to the top of the cupola I remembered Anita Ekberg’s call of “Marcello, Marcello!” in La Dolce Vita.

In fact the film shows Marcello Mastroianni descending several spiral staircases, a metaphor one presumes for his Dantesque descent into the moral underworld of 1950s Rome.

Observation platform around the lantern at the cupola’s summit

No chance of throwing yourself off here.

a fallen umbrella lies on the Vatican roof

Outside the cupola’s lantern you can see the serpentine queues winding below to the entrance. Pope’s names adorn every corner of the Vatican, even here on the lead roof, every window has an embossed papal coat of arms.

Saints wave from on high, my lens hood in the foreground

This is where I dropped my lens hood through the bars, only to roll down the roof out of reach – to be retrieved by a kind custodian.

sculptor on the roof with pugilist’s nose

A modest sized bust of a modest man – Michelangelo, sculptor, painter, poet and architect.

All year round we run private tours with photo workshops in Rome. These tours can be customized according to your needs.
You can see an example of a typical weekend photo workshop in the Eternal City, starting first thing Friday morning, finishing Sunday late afternoon, on my Rome Private Tour photo workshop. If you are in Rome for only a short time, our private photo tour will help you to really appreciate having such a fun and interesting encounter. With much to see and a great deal to learn in just three days, the Rome workshop will intensify your experience.

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This dream was to come true when my wife and I moved to Castel Gandolfo in 2002. We rented a flat in the grounds of a villa once owned by Visconti, bought when he was working on his masterpiece The Leopard  in 1962.

Diana’s Baths or The Nymphaeum of Bergantino, Castelgandolfo

One day Lucia told me she had discovered a large cave in the cliff running along the edge of Lake Albano full of garden rubbish. When we investigated further we made out amongst the bushes another bigger opening enclosed by wall with a rusty gate. This was the Nymphaeum of Bergantino built on the orders of Domitian in the grounds of his vast palace now in the gardens of the pope’s summer palace of Castel Gandolfo. The gate was unlocked and I was amazed by what I saw within. The arch is 17 metres across at the opening.

Piranesi Diana baths, Castelgandolfo Rome

Domitian was fond of a barbaric form of gladiatorial entertainment known as the Naumachia, or mock naval battles involving real combatants and it may be that Domitian watched from the shelter of the nymphaeum.
Piranesi drew the Nymphaeum in his inimitable manner in 1762 with nano figures to exaggerate the size of the arch.

Excavations in 1841 revealed mosaics of a gorgon and of Diana drawn in a chariot by four tritons as well as the remains of a marble sculpture of Ulysses slaying the Cyclops. None of which remain on site but are to be found in the private chambers of the pontifical palace. The marble walls and other sculptures disappeared in antiquity.

niches for statues

The Baths of Diana are not open to the public but you can visit them on a Camera Etrusca workshop in Rome or you can contact www.diakronica.it who organise guided visits.

I have recently shot one of my Belle pictures entitled Anima Mundi in this unique location which I will post soon in November 2013 on www.photonicholas.com

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Lake Albano from Castel Gandolfo. You wouldn’t believe that a place like the Alban Hills could be just 20kms from the centre of beautiful, enchanting, but chaotic Rome

As a child Piranesi fired my imagination like no other artist. I dreamed of finding a Roman crypto-portico at the bottom of my granny’s garden, his imaginary prisons unsettled my nights, his overgrown dark towers and gloomy grottoes encouraged my own voyage to Italy, his  colossal Roman ruins  inspired my photography.

Piranesi: Roman Tunnel Lake Albano

Piranesi moved art forward from Renaissance adoration of the classical to a baroque fascination with creating mood and theatrical effect. Piranesi’s perspective is unreal, his scale deliberately deceitful, and like a cinema poster designer in Hollywood’s golden age he sought to create gasps from his audience.

Piranesi’s print of the entrance Tunnel under Castel Gandolfo

One might be excused in thinking that the Caracalla Baths are anyway so huge that Piranesi is guilty of gilding the lily, yet many of his drawings succeed in exciting our curiosity precisely because he cheats.

The locked low door to the great court. We crawled in under the road.

Whilst living in Castelgandolfo over ten years ago I set out to find the Emissario of Lake Albano after seeing Piranesi’s engraving which reminded me of a flooded Egyptian temple.

The reality. Water used to flow from lake Albano (left) into the tunnel the other side of the walled court (photo below) on the right.

The tunnel was constructed by Etruscan hydraulic engineers for the Roman Republic starting in 398 BC to drain lake Albano which otherwise on occasion overflowed with disastrous results for the Roman Campagna. Livy describes the work as taking place during the siege of Veio and required the labour of 30,000 slaves tunnelling from either end. It is 1.2km or nearly a mile long.

The courtyard. The entrance to the 1.2km long tunnel is clearly visible

I managed to divine the curtain wall which concealed the entrance to the tunnel from the lake with a low door next to which was a Latin inscription indicating the entrance to the Emissary;  it was locked.

The ‘Egyptian’ columns

However a road runs along the lake shore and under the bridge was the former sluice gate, now high and dry as the lake level has unaccountably dropped over the last 20 years. It is possible to walk through at a crouch and though one can stand at a certain point I hardly recognised the Egyptian pylons, reduced as they were to Lilliputian scale. How had I been conned? Piranesi has included tiny figures, a fisherman and a cavorting nymph, a brilliant trick!

The entrance to the 1.2km long tunnel

Camera Etrusca explored the Roman tunnel of Lake Albano as part of a Rome weekend workshop in April 2012

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Fading fresco in Diana Temple, Nemi, Rome

Sometimes I come across a place purely by chance, sometimes I have been tipped off by a local, sometimes because I have read about it and have made a search.

I will endeavour to post articles about a wide variety of places, some very humble, others so noteworthy one wonders how they could possible have fallen into virtual oblivion. All have in common that they have fallen out of sight and consequently out of mind.

Temple of Diana, Nemi

Walls of Diana Temple

The Alban Hills national park, although nowadays practically a Roman suburb, is an area of wild natural beauty, deep crater lakes, forests, Renaissance villas and ancient ruins. Ten years ago my daughter was born in Genzano above Lake Nemi, and the evening before her birth I sat amongst the perfumed yellow broom watching the sun set a hundred metres or so above the ruins of the Temple dedicated to Diana, goddess of the hunt, but also child birth.

Turner’s ‘Golden Bough’ showing Lake Nemi

The scene was reminiscent of William Turner’s celebrated painting, The Golden Bough, painted probably from a spot very close to where I sat and contemplated the most life changing event of my life and the beginning of a new one. The event that Turner depicts relates how Aeneas breaks the golden bough in order to guide him into Hades to find his Father. Nemi is a place that almost overpowers one with atavistic emotion.

Sir James Frazer the father of anthropology started the long intellectual and scientific journey that was his magnum opus The Golden Bough from the ruins of Diana’s temple. The first chapter of which opens thus:

Who does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough?  The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi— “Diana’s Mirror,” as it was called by the ancients. No one who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban hills, can ever forget it. The two characteristic Italian villages which slumber on its banks, and the equally Italian palace whose terraced gardens descend steeply to the lake, hardly break the stillness and even the solitariness of the scene. Diana herself might still linger by this lonely shore, still haunt these woodlands wild.

Inner sanctum, temple of Vesta , Nemi, Rome

Given the fame of Diana herself and the importance and wide reaching effect that Frazer’s book had on scientists, artists, writers and philosophers in the 20th century you would think that the well excavated ruins of the temple would be something of a shrine and tourist attraction. Sadly this is not the case.

Nemi castle on the hill overlooking the temples ruins.

The site is not indicated, the path overgrown and the entrance gate broken open. The information boards so faded as to be illegible.

crumbling mosaics

From the photographer’s point of view the remains of the temple complex are photogenic, there is an air of Piranesi melancholy about the place and yet if only there was a museum with artefacts found on the site, or copies of the statues, or an explanation of the macabre story that Frazer relates in the opening chapter of his book, or just a local farmer selling confections of locally collected wild strawberries and chilled white wine from under an umbrella pine, how much fuller the experience would be.

Come and explore Diana’s temple in Nemi, search for the Golden Bough with a Camera Etrusca photo trip to the Alban Hills on the outskirts of Rome. 

cripto-portico in Nemi, Rome.

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