Lake Nemi

The Lake Nemi is one of the most picturesque landscapes of Italy. In Antiquity, the lake was on the territory of Aricie, close to the Lac of Albano. One found there a very famous sanctuary of Diane. A very old habit wanted that the priest of the goddess (the rex Nemorensis) is a fugitive slave. Nemorensis that became rex which managed to gather a branch of a particular tree of the lucus then to kill the rex places from there in duel. The rite, like the statue, would have been brought in Italy by Oreste, refugee with Nemi after having killed king de Chersonnèse of Thrace, Toante, and to have concealed the show of the sanguinary local goddess, Diane Taurique. Other divinities were honoured in Nemi: Egery and Virbius (which would be Hippolyte, killed by horses sent by Aphrodite and ressuscity by Esculape). The Diane divinity is complex: goddess of hunting and the wild life, but also infernal, protective goddess of the generations and the parturients. They are in fact several goddesses in one, as the currencies of republican time show it, with 3 figures side by side. The bronze head of one of these divinities (Ve S.) is in Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek of Copenhagen. The sanctuary becomes probably the center of the Latin league after the destruction of Alba. Caton mentions the dedication in the sanctuary of a dictator of Tusculum, Egerius Baebius. He speaks about a league which includes/understands neither Alba nor Rome but only Tusculum, Aricie, Lanuvium, Laurentum (Lavinium), Cora, Tivoli, Pometia and Ardée. The sanctuary must be then restructured (fine Life-beginning Ve S.), by using the space released thanks to the construction of the emissary (and occupied by the current village of Nemi). The sanctuary is localized in the North of the lake since XVIIe S. He was constantly excavated and plundered since then and one finds material in the museums of Copenhagen, of England, of the United States, with the delle Giulia Villa and Museo Terme. The vestiges are mainly réenterrés. One located the road leading of Aricie to the sanctuary (with tagliate in the rock). The temple consists of a large platform, partly artificial, is limited by a gantry to column. In North, one located a series of coins, perhaps the dwellings of the priests. A building of 30 X 15,90 m is slightly shifted. It is perhaps about the temple (but he does not correspond by to description that Vitruve gives some, IV, 8,4). The temple is thus probably more in the East. One discovered a great number of votive objects inside the sanctuary (terra cotta, bronzes, currencies), in particular in the septentrional gantry (of which portraits of the imperial family). An inscription makes it possible to date the gantry from the end of IIe S. (and thus in contemporaneity with the sanctuary of Palestrina). With this phase corresponds a head of marble statue (in Copenhagen), outgoing of the same workshop as that of Fortuna huiusce diei of the Champ de Mars (temple B of the Argentina Largo), gone back to 101-100. On the platea of the sanctuary was to be sacella dedicated to minor divinities (of which Isis and Bubastis). César had a villa close to the lake; it constitutes the initial core of the imperial properties of the zone. Under the Genzano locality opens the emissary, probably carried out to release the sanctuary of the marshy influences while cause a drop in the level of the lake. The gallery emerges in the Ariccia valley and measurement 1653 m length. The opening, side lake, are in opus quadratum of large blocks of tuff. The technique makes it possible to think that it is contemporary of the emissary of the Alba Lake (IVe S.?). The principal index of presence of the imperial villa is consisted of the two boats discovered in 1927-1932 and destroyed in 1944.

Random links: