Temple of Hadrian: A God Inside the Stock Exchange
Why is it significant?
Stand with your back to the cafés and take in the wall facing you: eleven enormous fluted marble columns, each around fifteen metres tall, scorched and pitted, with the windows of an office building peering out between them.
Key Facts
| Place | Temple of Hadrian: A God Inside the Stock Exchange |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza di Pietra, 00186 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.89980, 12.47940 |
| Part of Walk | Emperors Underfoot: Augustus and the Buried Campus Martius of Rome |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand with your back to the cafés and take in the wall facing you: eleven enormous fluted marble columns, each around fifteen metres tall, scorched and pitted, with the windows of an office building peering out between them. It looks like a temple swallowed by a bank... and that is more or less what happened.
This was the Temple of the Deified Hadrian, dedicated in 145 AD by his adopted son and successor, Antoninus Pius. Hadrian was the emperor-architect, the restless traveller who rebuilt the Pantheon a few streets away and left Agrippa's name on its porch. He died unloved by the Senate, which was reluctant to make him a god, and it took Antoninus's stubborn insistence before this temple could rise in its colonnaded square.
The temple was decorated with reliefs of the provinces of the empire, each one shown as a woman in local dress, a kind of marble map of Roman power. Some of them survive in museums in Rome and Naples. The columns survived because they were useful: in the 1690s, under Pope Innocent the Twelfth, the architect Carlo Fontana and his son turned the ruin into the papal customs house for goods arriving by land.
So merchants paid their duties among the columns of a god. Later the building housed Rome's stock exchange, and today it belongs to the Chamber of Commerce. Romans like to joke that the temple never really changed religion. Now look down at the foot of the columns: their base is partly exposed below today's paving, because the ancient piazza lies several metres beneath the modern one.
Hadrian admired Augustus and copied him in more ways than one. He too built an enormous round mausoleum for his dynasty, across the river, the building we now call Castel Sant'Angelo. Keep that in mind for the end of this walk. Now take the short Via dei Bergamaschi north, and step out into a square dominated by another emperor's column.