The Romans conquered the Etruscan settlement at Fiesole in 90BC. The troops of Marcus Portius Cato took the town after a lengthy siege using a nearby encampment as a base. That camp later became the city of Florence.
The conquest of Fiesole was destructive and saw much of the Etruscan town burnt to the ground. However, archaeologists have discovered that after a period of abandonment, Fiesole’s Etruscan walls and one of its temples were rebuilt along Roman lines. The site was then fully reoccupied as a Roman town, with additional features such as a theatre and Roman baths.
The Roman Theatre
Fiesole’s Roman theatre was built into the natural rocks of one of the town’s hills shortly after the site’s reoccupation in the first century BC and along the main Roman road leading to the forum.
The original structure and layout of the theatre remain visible on the site of Fiesole. The best seats in the house were situated near the orchestra and reached by a series of vaulted passages that ran under the cavea or general seating area.
Several flights of stairs ran up through the cavea, with each stairway consisting of three flights of ten steps. The original right-hand staircase of the theatre still survives today.
Only the foundations of the scaenae frons or stage backdrop remain, but these are sufficient to show the three doors that actors used to access the stage. Of the behind-scenes area, the most interesting part to survive is a semi-circular room used to operate the mechanism that opened the theatre’s curtain.
The theatre was redecorated in the third century AD. Only a few fragments of the multicoloured orchestra mosaics remain as well as marble reliefs of mythical scenes and deities, preserved in the site’s museum.
The Roman Baths
The Roman baths have been much more extensively restored than the theatre, but little of their decorative features remain. All that remains are some bronze sheets of epigrams, and the marble base of a statue of Hercules recovered from the tepidarium.
The baths divided into internal and external areas. The interior bathhouse followed the typical Roman pattern, consisting of a caldarium with an opus signinum floor and was equipped with three small pools. Two furnaces heated it. The brick underfloor hypocaust pillars used to heat the floor survive.
The tepidarium was heated by one furnace. This room led straight into the oldest room, the frigidarium, which was subdivided into three, with a semi-circular plunge pool to the left. The toilets lay behind the frigidarium.
Outside, the bathhouse had two pools divided by a central room or cryptoporticus. One served as a plunge pool, the other as a swimming pool. Both offered excellent views of the territory of Fiesole.
Resources
Marco de Marco. Giunti Gruppo (1999) Fiesole: Archaeological Site and Museum Editorial: Fiesole
