In Livia’s Garden

In Italy, sometimes you go looking for art—and sometimes it comes to you

Villa di Livia garden frescoes. All photos mine.

Art. I adore it, despite nearly having been defeated by the art history course I took in college, which sped through the greatest hits from the prehistoric age to the 20th century. (Don’t ask me about the final exam.) So you’d think I’d remember where or how I first stumbled upon the garden frescoes from the Villa di Livia. I saw photos first, then the frescoes themselves, which were painted between 30 and 20 BC and once decorated a 20-by-40-foot semi-subterranean room in a villa on the northern fringes of Rome. They are stunningly beautiful—and they left me enamored but also bereft. A strange response, I thought; after all, I’ve wanted to rip plenty of artworks off walls and pedestals and take them home with me. But these garden scenes—they were different. It wasn’t enough to see them; I had a visceral need to lose myself in them. Gazing at them, I felt a sense of longing, even loss. At first I thought it might be, at least in part, because they’ve survived millennia and they’re the oldest known examples of Roman garden paintings. (If you’ve read this post, you know how jazzed I get about reeeaallly old stuff.)

But no. I think there’s another reason. We’ll get to that in a minute.

Livia’s villa is in Prima Porta, once the northernmost gate of Rome, 7.5 miles north of the city along the historic Via Flaminia, which linked Rome to Rimini on the Adriatic coast. Abandoned in the fifth century A.D., the villa was rediscovered in 1863. That’s a long time for art to survive in an abandoned space (a room that most likely was a triclinium, a formal Roman dining room in which people ate while semi-recumbent). But the frescoes had to wait nearly another century, until 1951, to be resurrected and restored. Since 1998 they have been displayed, in a room similar in size to the original, at Rome’s Palazzo Massimo. And that’s where I saw them, in all their jaw-dropping glory, one day last spring.

Of the four styles of Roman wall paintings, Livia’s garden frescoes fall into the category “Architectural,” which evolved during the reign of Augustus (more on him in a minute). In this style, says Wikipedia, “the landscape elements eventually took over to cover the entire wall, with no framing device, so it looked to the viewer as if he or she was merely looking out of a room onto a real scene. [. . .] Instead of confining and strengthening the walls, the goal was to break down the wall to show scenes of nature and the outside world.” The gardens contain 69 species of birds and 24 species of trees and plants, both Italian natives and those from elsewhere in the Roman Empire, and include pines, firs, oaks, date palms, strawberries, chamomile, poppies, and acanthus. The blurring of some of the tree branches suggests movement, as if a breeze has stirred them, and yet there’s a sense of calm, even stasis, because all these varied plants and birds exist together in one eternal season of blooming, nesting, and flight.

But who was this Livia? Obviously a Roman woman of status, I thought, but no one I’d heard of. Well, shame on me. Her name was Livia Drusilla (later called Julia Augusta), and she was the third wife of Caesar Augustus, who reigned from 27 BC to 14 AD and brought peace to Rome, a true Golden Age, after a long period of civil wars. Augustus, it’s said, fell in love with Livia instantly and promptly divorced his then-wife. (It was Livia’s second marriage, too; Augustus may have “facilitated” her divorce.) By some accounts Livia was modest, faithful, and dedicated to her husband (even making some of his clothing herself); others say she was a proud, scheming harpy. Sources have conflicting opinions about how loving the marriage was (though, notably, it lasted 51 years despite being childless), but they agree that Livia was a powerful behind-the-scenes counselor to Augustus. (She’s rumored to have enabled some political careers and several murders. Seriously? Nothing ever changes, does it? From Livia to today’s hero(in)es, powerful women must always be maligned.) Augustus, in turn, gave Livia the freedom to manage her own finances. Apparently she had quite a good head for business: she bought and oversaw copper mines, palm groves, and papyrus marshes in various parts of the world.

Livia Drusilla. Photo: romanoimpero.com/2010/06/livia-augusta.html

After Augustus’ death, one of Livia’s sons by her first marriage, Tiberius, became emperor, at least partially due to Livia’s machinations. After a while mother and son fell out, apparently because Tiberius was embarrassed by Livia’s power and ambition and the fact that he’d become emperor because of her political clout. Writes author Daisy Dunn in an essay on Domina, a 2021 BBC series about Livia: “Historically, the relationship between Livia and Tiberius has been characterised as an ugly power struggle, with the historians claiming that the mother longed to be co-ruler, while the son resented her influence. We might instead picture a woman seeking to impart her wisdom and experience to a son who yearns only to do things his own way.”

Eventually, though, 14 years after her death in 29 AD, Livia regained her status, at least for a while. Deified by her grandson, Claudius, she was called Diva Augusta (the Divine Augusta) and her face has been preserved in portraits and on coins and statues. An impressive 87 years old when she died, she attributed her longevity, said Roman historian and scribe Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD), to a particular wine she drank regularly, Vinum Pucinum.

I knew none of this when I first saw Livia’s frescoed garden, nor when, as so often happens in Italy, her garden found me, by sheer chance, in a shop in Cortona. All I knew then was that I wanted that garden, some sense of it, in my life.

A friend and I were in Cortona, browsing at what we thought was a card shop—which it is, but only on the surface. When I went inside to pay, I complimented the woman at the register on her shop, and she said, “Oh, have you seen the rest?” Because if you go down a very narrow winding staircase you’ll find two more floors filled with art, plus an Etruscan well. We wandered around, admiring gorgeous landscape photography, colorful ceramics, maps, prints. And then I saw it—mounted on nearly black wood and held in place with rustic clips, a spectacular bit of Livia’s garden.

Is this not a gorgeous reproduction of Livia’s garden?

In chatting with Ivan, the husband of the woman upstairs, I heard the story of this reproduction—how the original scan of the large-format photo, and the photo itself, were for some unknown, appalling reason discarded by whoever did the scan, and so Ivan had to arrange with the Palazzo Massimo to do a photo shoot himself, then do the herculean task of finding a scanner big enough to make the digital image. (All of this was, of course, to justify the price I was balking at, though Ivan also clearly enjoyed telling the story.) Because of all the time and money he’d invested into the photo, the scan, and the mounted piece of art, he said, after this one was sold, any subsequent pieces would cost €40-50 more. (Nudge, nudge. My friend was no help. “Buy it,” he said. “It’s a good price. You love it.”) Now, don’t go thinking the price was astronomical—but it was a stretch for me. So I continued to stew and balk and suffer and eventually left without it. But when I went back (you knew this was coming), there it was, waiting for me, clearly mine, this scene from Livia’s garden.

Here’s the real version of “my” art.

Now, back to the reason Livia’s frescoes provoked such a powerful response in me. It wasn’t only their beauty, nor their age, nor the marvel of a room-turned-garden. It was Livia herself, a woman whose presence was potent enough to linger in these garden paintings she must have loved. And now that I know something about this strong woman so often maligned, I want to know more, much more. In the meantime, there she is, emanating from the garden scene on my wall, taking me back more than 2,000 years.

I wish I could have known her. So let me indulge in a little daydreaming.

It’s a hot midsummer day, and Livia and I are sitting in her garden for due chiacchiare (a little chat), enjoying sweating goblets of Vinum Pucinum (which, by the way, is a predecessor of my beloved prosecco). The same slight breeze that’s stirring the painted trees lifts the tendrils of hair on our necks and carries the sounds of summer, birdsong and the percussive trill of insects. We’ll talk of love, the ridiculousness of men, their boyish vulnerability, their charm and devotion, their betrayals. We’ll talk of children, the pride they bring, the joys and heartache, sometimes both at once. We’ll talk of our dreams and disappointments, our dashed hopes, our victories small and large. I’ll hear her story, her truth, and it will make mine pale in comparison; after all, I’m no empress, no influencer of powerful men. Then off Livia will go to her bed—perhaps empty, perhaps possessed by an impatient Augustus or, in his absence, a lover—and I will sit in the garden until dawn, dozing and waking to gaze at those gardened walls, always finding something new in the shifting light.

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Books of the week:

• Of Gods and Men: 100 Stories from Ancient Greece and Rome by Daisy Dunn

• Livia, Empress of Rome: A Biography by Matthew Dennison

• Livia: First Lady of Imperial Rome by Anthony Barrett

Normally I recommend only books I’ve read—not the case this week. But they look good, don’t they?

Poem of the week:

• “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou

Comments? Questions? I’d love to hear from you.