Museu do Teatro Romano: Nero's Stage on the Hillside
Why is it significant?
Look over the railing into the pit of honey-coloured stone below the street: curved steps, column bases, a stage front carved with fragments of ornament, all set into the slope of the hill. Houses perch above it as if nobody had noticed it was there. For a long time, nobody had.
Key Facts
| Place | Museu do Teatro Romano: Nero's Stage on the Hillside |
|---|---|
| Address | Rua de São Mamede 3A, 1100-532 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71060, -9.13240 |
| Part of Walk | Saints, Sieges and Stairways: Alfama and the Castelo de São Jorge in Lisbon |
| Generated | Generated |
Look over the railing into the pit of honey-coloured stone below the street: curved steps, column bases, a stage front carved with fragments of ornament, all set into the slope of the hill. Houses perch above it as if nobody had noticed it was there. For a long time, nobody had.
This was the theatre of Olisipo, Roman Lisbon. The city became a privileged Roman town under Augustus, with the proud name Felicitas Iulia Olisipo, and a theatre was the kind of building a town like that needed to prove it was civilised. The seats were cut into the slope facing the river, so the audience watched comedies and tragedies with the Tagus glittering behind the stage.
The most remarkable find is an inscription. It records that in the year 57, under the emperor Nero, a wealthy local priest of the imperial cult called Gaius Heius Primus paid to rebuild the stage front and the orchestra. Imagine that... the name of a Lisbon benefactor, carved in stone almost two thousand years ago, reading like a modern sponsor's plaque.
And here is the twist. The theatre was rediscovered because of a catastrophe. In 1798, as workmen cleared rubble and rebuilt this hillside after the 1755 earthquake, they struck the Roman stones. An Italian architect working in Lisbon, Francisco Xavier Fabri, made careful drawings of what was found... and then the city simply built over it again. Only from the 1960s did archaeologists dig it out properly, and the museum opened beside it in 2001.
Think about that for a moment. The same disaster that destroyed the Lisbon of the kings uncovered the Lisbon of the emperors. Every time this city has been knocked down, it has found something older underneath. Now walk down the street to the end and turn right, past the old Aljube prison, which under the dictatorship held political prisoners and is now a museum of resistance, to the twin towers of the cathedral.