The Palace and the Episcopal Domus

The director of the Aquileia Foundation, the archaeologist Cristiano Tiussi tells us about the Palazzo and the Domus Episcopale, another extraordinary place that bears witness to the history of the ancient Roman city through the centuries. We find ourselves inside the Domus and Palazzo Episcopale which is a newly built museum complex which contains within it a real cross-section of what is the history of Aquileia on several superimposed layers, giving us a bit of a sense of what the subsoil of this great Roman city can still reserve us. In fact, here we find three stratifications, three mosaic floors which cover a chronological span of about three centuries and which are precisely superimposed on each other over a height of almost two and a half metres. The lowest level is that of a domus, a Roman house, probably built at the beginning of the first century after Christ and it has a simple floor in terracotta tiles but it has a characteristic that we rarely find in Aquileia: that is to keep a wall frescoed something that does not happen very often in this city. The intermediate level is that of a large apsidal hall from the 4th century AD which was partially uncovered but which reveals features surprisingly close to those of the floors of the Basilica of Aquileia in its first phase, in the phase dating back to the time of Constantine, it is almost a fragment of the floor of the Basilica brought here inside a private house which probably leads us to suppose that the same workers at work in the Basilica were also engaged in sumptuous houses in the vicinity of the Basilica itself. At the upper level we have instead the floor of the episcopal palace. Around the beginning of the fifth century after Christ, the bishop of Aquileia who was by then a very important and authoritative figure in the city decided to buy everything around the Basilica to build himself a sumptuous building, a sumptuous palace and this floor, the upper floor and the floor in terracotta cubes that flank it are the remains of the residence of the bishop of Aquileia. It is a particularly evocative place precisely because in this place one almost enters the history of Aquileia, one can truly immerse oneself in the history of Aquileia. It is a place to which I am particularly attached because the investigations carried out in 2010 in an almost unexpected way brought us exceptional discoveries and from that moment the Aquileia Foundation began a planning process which then ended six years ago with the creation of this museum building to which I must say I contributed in my role as director of the Aquileia Foundation.