ROME,
March 9 (Xinhua) -- Four frescoed rooms in Ancient Roman Emperor Augustus's
House on Rome's Palatine Hill opened to the public for the first time on Sunday.
Italian experts believe the rooms, found in the 1970s
below the ruins of Augustus's sprawling imperial palace, were part of a smaller
house where he lived when he was still just Julius Caesar's adoptive son
Octavian and not Rome's first emperor.
The four surviving rooms from the two-storey house
are a dining room, a bedroom and a large entrance hall on the ground floor, and
a small study on the floor above.
The windowless rooms received light from the
entrance, which once looked out onto extensive gardens but is now blocked off by
a wall dating to the reign of Nero (37-68 AD).
Fragments of the rooms' frescoes found by Italian
archaeologists on the floor have been painstakingly pieced back together during
a 1.5 million-euro restoration of the house.
Experts say the frescoes are among the most splendid
surviving examples of Roman wall painting, on a par with those currently housed
in the National Museum of Rome at Palazzo Massimo and those found in the house
of Augustus's wife Livia.
Guided tours of the house will be covered by a new
single ticket offering access to the Roman Forums, the Colosseum and the
Palatine.
But only five people at a time will be allowed in to
see the rooms due to their small dimensions and the fragility of the frescoes.
Augustus's House has been revealing new finds for
years, although most of the digs are off-limits to visitors.
Augustus, the first emperor of Rome and the architect
of the famed "pax romana" ("Roman peace"), began building the mausoleum in 28 BC
after seeing the mausoleum of Alexander the Great in Egypt.
He was entombed in his creation in AD 14, and after
him many other emperors and their loved ones were buried in niches of the
building.
