Following Hadrian | Photoset: The temple of Antoninus and Faustina, Rome

One thought on “Following Hadrian | Photoset: The temple of Antoninus and Faustina, Rome”

1. There is an urban legend as to how those columns got those deep groves in them which saddly even found it’s way in the official onsite Forum audioguide tour ~2005.
   This was my post on the Fodors messageboard in 2013.

   “In guidebooks, audioguides and tour guides they often claim that the deep grooves at the top of the columns were made by Renaissance workers *trying* to pull down the columns.

   Wrong! Those boys had no problems in taking columns from all over Rome to be reused esp in churchs, if they wanted them they would be gone now.

   And a rope isn’t going to cut deep grooves into a hard marble column just by pulling on it!

   But if a rope is tied to the column to support something heavy and after years of the wind and weather gently moving it, it will wear in a groove and as the rope is replaced over the years it’s placed in the same grooved notch.

   You can see this in London’s Westminster Abbey where ropes were tied to the interior columns to support staging for seating IIRC.
   The weight and movement of people over the years caused the rope’s slight movement to cut into these columns.

   So in 1429 or 1430, Pope Martin V gave the church to the Collegio degli Speziali (College of Chemists and Herbalists or the ‘Guild of Apothacaries’ {druggists}), at the time officially known as the Universitas Aromatorium.

   And they built a heavy wooden roof tied to the columns surrounding the temple’s porch.

   Also this is my take, if you look at the sides of the columns you will see an up/down line of small holes, I’ve seen this before and I’m very certain these were for supporting wooden walls placed between the columns.

   So with a roof and walls this porch is now a seperate enclosed bldg from the church.

   And the roof/column theory is the only one that makes any logical sense.
   The column toppling theory was just a *guess* by one early archaeologist which caught on as fact and became an urban legend.

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