5 Incredibly Well Preserved Roman Buildings

[Music] the Roman Empire reached its height about 2,000 years ago yet in the RS that it occupied at left marks which can still be seen today in the form of ancient ruins and aqueducts needless to say when the Romans built they built to last but some of the buildings were actually so well made and so blessed by fortune as to survive more or less intact to this day and in this video we're going to take a closer look at some of them the Mason cladding is an ancient Roman temple located in the city of NIEM in southern France the building is almost exactly 2,000 years old being completed in the year - ad and dedicated a couple of years later - Gaius and Lucy a Caesar two grandsons and adopted heirs of Emperor Augustus both died young the manor commissioned the building was their father marcus vipsanius agrippa a politician general and a close friend of the emperor at about 26 metres long and 14 metres wide the building would have dominated the forum of the ancient city following its initially used as a temple it has served as a home a stable a church and then during the 19th century it was turned into a museum of fine arts and through all of this the exterior has miraculously remained more or less unchanged the interior though is another story located near the city of Caronia in northwestern Spain in what the Romans once called the end of the earth lies the Tower of Hercules this tower is the oldest lighthouse in the world still to be in use and at half of 55 metres it's actually the second tallest lighthouse in all of Spain the building that we see today was probably built during the reign of Emperor Trajan in the second century AD although it's possible that there wasn't even older Phoenician building on the site before that the design is believed to have been inspired by the great Lighthouse of Alexandria in Egypt and as we can read from a stone inscription in one of the walls the architect who created it was a certain guidance Severus lupus from minium now known as Coimbra in Portugal the tower has been in constant use ever since and in 1788 it was renovated and extended by adding a new story over the centuries the Roman Senate has been housed in several different buildings the first one is set up in an Etruscan temple built stone at the Jews with the say bones this original building was imagined destroyed though and rebuilt by King tullus hostilius of Rome sometime in the 600's BC after a couple of centuries had passed the building was distorted again this time by fire and a new structure was built by the general and dictator Cornelius sonna but after that if another Senate house or a Curia was built by Julius Caesar and that building actually survives today it's known simply as Julius Senate House or the Curia Giulia and is located within the committee of the Roman Forum now to be strict this isn't actually the original building from the time of Caesar that one had been restored twice from the Year 81 to 96 by emperor Domitian and in 283 by Emperor Karina's then in 284 to 305 it was completely rebuilt by Emperor Diocletian and it's the remnants of that building that still stand today the reason why it's still here is because it was converted to a church in the seventh century but the Curia julia has now unfortunately lost much of its former grandeur the walls both on the inside and outside would have originally been decorated with slabs of marble and at the end of the hall fitted with chairs for a total of about 300 senators would have been the altar of victory featuring a statue of the goddess Victoria standing on a globe and extending a wreath in the marketplace of the seaside city of Pula in Croatia vicen ancient Roman temple it shares many similarities with the Maison carrée in NIEM for example its Corinthian columns and richly decorated frieze and is together with it considered the best complete Roman monuments outside of Italy according to an inscription the temple is dedicated in honor of Roma the goddess of the city of Rome and Augustus Caesar son of the deified jewel Caeser father of his country this makes for another similarity with Maison carrée since Emperor Augustus who offers death was deified is not referred to here as a God it Otto been built during his reign just like the temple in France when it was built the temple wasn't alone like it is now but stood at the left side in a row of three temples to the right of the larger central one was a similar building and dedicated to Diana goddess of the hunt moon and nature Potter which were incorporated into the communal palace built in 1296 the pattern of old Roman buildings been turned into churches applies in the case of the temple of augustus as well although it later gained a less glamorous use as a granary by the late 19th century it has sadly been concealed behind a bunch of houses and during the Second World War it was rocked by a bomb during an allied air raid and also almost completely destroyed luckily the building could be reconstructed from the fragments left behind and is today used as Museum of Roman sculpture finally we've come to one of the most famous of all Roman buildings the Pantheon both on the inside and outside it has remained almost entirely unchanged since antiquity and thus one can read on the front it was built by Marcus Agrippa the same Marcus Agrippa who commissioned the Maison carrée in France but it's not quite as simple as that because the original building which would have been a more traditional rectangular temple burned down and also to rebuild by Emperor Hadrian from 118 228 ad libbing behind only the front of a rapist tempo this new building was radical for slime for one it consisted of a large circular dome and thus broke with the tradition of the rectangular layout it also unusually emphasized the interior space rather than the exterior with its lavish walls of coloured marble and lastly it's remarkable for its sheer size in fact this was actually the largest dome in the world all the way up to the Renaissance and remains the world's largest unenforced concrete dome to this day the name Pantheon which roughly means something common to all gods has led many to believe that all Roman deities were worshipped here but that's not necessarily the case the Roman senator Casillas do speculated that the name comes either from the many statues of gods placed around the building or from the resemblance of the dome to the heavens the fact that no one really seemed to know suggest that Pantheon might just have been a nickname for the building with its official name now being forgotten it's also noteworthy that's according to Livy temples dedicated to more than one God had been forbidden for the simple reason that if say lightning were to strike the building you wouldn't know which God was offended at inner eight the Pantheon was later you guessed it converted into a church and was thus kept from falling into ruin when an interest in the ancient world eventually appeared during the Renaissance this building became incredibly important for shaping the view of Roman architecture and served as an inspiration for many new buildings making the rotunda with a portico style far more common in subsequent centuries than ever was during antiquity examples of this could be Thomas Jefferson's library in the University of Virginia or the Pantheon in Paris completed shortly before the Revolution [Music]

Channel: Kings and Things

Views: 1,734,542

Keywords: history, roman empire, julius caesar, augustus, roman republic, roman senate, hadrian, diocletian, roman history, history of rome, roman emperors, roman architecture, roman buildings, vitruvius, classical architecture, pantheon, nîmes, pula, ancient ruins, ancient buildings, ancient history, corinthian, temple, ancient temple

Id: HPzgGW6Cfsk

Length: 7min 54sec (474 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 12 2018