NEMI

Altitude 521 m (1,710 feet). 1,900 inhabitants

From the Latin word nemus, forest, meaning the famous forest dedicated to the goddess Diana, still surrounding the city today

Palazzo Ruspoli

Ruspoli Palace

Built around the twlfth century as castle of the Counts of Tusculum

From 1572 Nemi belonged to the Frangipane family. They separated the palace from the castle

Nemi in 1781 was sold to Luigi Onesti Braschi, nephew of Pius VI Braschi (1775/99), who had the building renovated by Giuseppe Valadier (1762/1839)

In 1901 the palace was bought by the Ruspoli family who sold it in the nineties to a private company

Museo delle Navi Romane

Museum of Roman Ships

It used to house the two ships about 70 m (230 feet) long of Caligula (37/41) identified already in the fifteenth century at the bottom of the lake and recovered in 1928

They were used for festivals in honor of Diana and sank at the time of Claudius (41/54)

The museum was inaugurated in 1936 but in June 1944, during the retreat of the Germans of World War Two, the ships were destroyed

It reopened in 1988 with models of ships, archaeological material and old photographs

Busts and bronze balustrades are now in the Museo Nazionale Romano in Palazzo Massimo

Villa di Cesare

Caesar’s Villa

Rich villa maybe owned by Julius Caesar in the Santa Maria area on the southern slopes of the crater, with tanks, baths, exedra, lakeside terrace, rooms with paintings

Maybe it collapsed induring an earthquake in the third or fourth century AD

Temple of Diana Aricina or Nemorense

To the northeast of the crater

Dimensions of the temple proper: 30 x 15.90 m (99 x 52 feet), in an area of ​​45,000 sqm (11 acres)

It became the center of an alliance of the Latin peoples after the destruction of Alba Longa

Excavations began in the seventeenth century, at the hands of foreigners, and so most of the finds are in various museums of Europe

Something is in the Museum of Roman Ships, in the Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome and in the National Roman Museum

Diana was venerated in Nemi in her triple aspect of the goddess of hunting and forestry (Diana-Artemis), the goddess of the underworld (Hecate) and the protector of births (Lucina)

Her statue was in fact with three bodies, as shown by a coin of the Republican period and what remains of a marble statuary group of the first century AD in the National Roman Museum

Diana was one of the most complex goddesses of ancient mythology, as well as complex and bloody was her ritual and worship

Effluent of Lake Nemi

Dug in the fourth century BC, a work of the Aricini people (inhabitants of the town of Aricia), when Rome was still just a rural settlement

It was opened to regulate the waters of the lake avoiding flooding on flat terrain in the valley and to irrigate crops in the plain of Ariccia

1,653 m (5,365 feet) long with a difference in elevation between entry and exit of 12.63 m (41.4 feet)

Once water would exit the conduit it would have been channeled into an external ditch 2,100 m (6,900 feet) long, and then again underground in the so-called tunnel Cunicolo Aricino (Ariccia’s Tunnel), today unfortunately reduced to sewer, 610 m (2,000 feet) long and eventually flowing into the sea, near Ardea, after a distance of about 15 km (9.3 miles)

At the entrance of the effluent there are facilities for the regulation of the water outflow. Originally there were wooden gates and today it is still possible to see the grooves carved in marble where the gates would have been drawn

There was also a kind of filter with a marble sieve to prevent the entry of logs and other materials in the effluent