The salutatio indicates the act of greeting and, by extension, visiting or offering a gift. In its simplest meaning, it represents the morning greeting, received by the Dominus or the pater familias, expressed with the simple phrase Ave or Ave Dominus....

The clients generally represented all people of lower rank, who exercised a form of reverence towards their patron. Clients would go to the domus or villa of the Dominus early in the morning for the salutatio, a token of their respect and act of obedience and submission, to obtain the benevolence o...

The room, for public use, located outside the porticoed courtyard with access from the Aedicula of Venus, is placed at a lower level than the floor of the courtyard. The latrine is preceded by a small entrance antechamber, easily accessible from the thermal baths area, used by its visitors, who woul...

The Ionic style is the second of the three main orders of classical architecture, after Doric and before Corinthian. Ionic columns, placed on a moulded base, are slender and fluted, reaching a maximum height of ten times the base diameter. The Ionic capital is flattened with a flattened abacus abo...

A triumphal arch, also called an arch of triumph, is a parallelepiped piece of architecture with the characteristics of a monumental gate in the form of an arc. It was usually built to celebrate a victory in war and the related triumph of the Dux or Imperator. This tradition was born in Rome and dev...

Flavius Julius Constantius, better known as Constantius II, was appointed by his father Constantine the Great, as emperor subordinate to an augustus. In 337 AD, he assumed power in the eastern part of the Empire, threatened by the Sassanids and internal divisions. Like his father, he played a fund...

The Obelisk still stands today, with its grandeur and 32 metres of height, in front of the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran, built by Pope Sixtus V. Its history has distant origins in the 15th century BC, when the Egyptian sovereign Thutmose III had it built to be erected in the Amun-Re Temple in ...

A biapsidal hall indicates a room that is generally rectangular in shape, used as a passage, waiting area or hallway. The hall is biapsidal because its two short sides end in an apse. In this case, the apse is covered by a segmental hemisphere that connects with the vault covering the hall....

The Obelisk of Augustus was one of the obelisks in the centre of the Circus Maximus, that Augustus, Roman emperor, brought to the city in 10 BC following the conquest of the Egyptian region by the Romans twenty years earlier. The monument, from the Egyptian city of Heliopolis, not far from Cairo, d...

The Circus Maximus is the oldest and largest of the buildings designed by the Romans, used mainly for chariot races. Over the course of the imperial age, similar structures became increasingly important in the life of the Roman citizen. According to a legend, Romulus was behind the idea of having t...