Aniene River Valley and Nero's Villa

The Aniene is located in a narrow valley among steep rocks and precipitous tree-lined slopes in very picturesque scenery. Approximately 1 1/2 kilometers after Subiaco you reach the junction near the Rapone Bridge, or San Mauro, dominated by the ex-chapel of San Mauro with circular design. From the bridge there is a beautiful view over the narrow ravine which looks onto the Aniene. Keeping to the left, on the street that goes to the Monasteries, a bit after you will see a wide-tiered pedestrian street on the left that goes up into the woods, and immediately next to that, there are archaeological remains enclosed by a wire mesh, where they are doing excavations.
Today seeing all of these ruins together, which are not even very extensive, it is difficult to imagine that many centuries ago this was one of the most beautiful and attractive places of the ancient Roman world.
In fact, Nero, the great Roman emperor who built the splendid Domus Aurea in Rome, decided on this location to realize one of his large out-of-the-city villas, surely before 60 A.D., the year in which its existence was documented.
Almost nothing seemed impossible to the Roman architects of the era, not even the creation of three lakes from scratch, the Simbruina stops flowing, obstructing the course of the river with two dams and a bridge-dam, called "pons minimus" and by crossing the other bridge, the "pons marmoreus"; all of this on a vibrant river like the Aniene, often a protagonist of floods. From here the name "Sublaqueum", given first to the villa and then passed to the nearby town, it seems was born to house those who worked on the villa, who certainly must have been busy, from the engineers to the stone-cutters, from the plumbers to the brick-layers, from the carpenters to the blacksmiths, all the way to the sculptors, designers, painters in a very laborious undertaking.
All of the building, it seems, occupied the major area of that occupied by Villa Adriana.
The "via sublacense", created expressly perhaps using a part of the service street of the aqueducts that supplied water to the Capital, led to the villa, which was harmoniously inserted into the landscape of great beauty.

Today, looking at the narrow Aniene Valley, we can only try to imagine the grandness of the work created by Nero's architects: the river created three large lakes (some hundreds of meters long and as wide as the valley) connected by high waterfalls. On the two shores of these lakes, in the few flat places (the valley is very narrow and full of rocky faces) rise the various centers of the villa, connected by walkways and bridges tha went from one part to the other...
In the Middle Ages, on the remains of Nero's Villa, one of the small cenoby was constructed, founded by San Benedetto (St. Benedict) to house the monks of his newborn Order and of this few traces remain.
We recommend without a doubt, first going up to the Monasteries; at the junction for them, go right onto a small asphalt street that goes down to the shores of the river. After several hundred meters, there is a space where you can leave the car to get out on foot at the shore of the river. Cross the wooden bridge and a lovely, short path in the woods goes to a pretty waterfall and a small lake called "San Benedetto".