Aventinus: Colonnades

The remains of two perpendicular colonnades of the Republican period were found on the NW *Aventine, under the SE aisle of S. Sabina, during excavations in the 1930s and 1960s (Darsy 19 fig. 6, 22, 85, 88; for a fuller, yet widely ignored, documentation: Krautheimer 82 with pl. V; see fig. 8). The smaller colonnade, attributed to the 4th or 3rd c. B.C., consists of two peperino columns with an anta-like pier; the intercolumniations were closed with opus reticulatum masonry during the late-Republican or early-Imperial period (Darsy loc.cit.; Coarelli; Andreussi 126). The second colonnade stands next to and at a right angle to the first; it runs for 14 m and has four travertine columns, arranged in two pairs (W. 0.5 m, note that the wider central intercolumniation is greater than twice the axial distance [3.30 m] of the pairs). The second colonnade probably dates from the 1st c. B.C., and was eventually embedded in a 2nd c. A.D. basement wall comprised of both opus reticulatum and brick (Krautheimer, loc. cit., who includes the smaller colonnade in his plans but not in the text). The smaller colonnade, with its distyle column-and-pier arrangement, has been understood as a “tempietto” (Coarelli; Andreussi 126; yet both fail to consider Krautheimer’s documentation), and associated with a postulated Augustan restoration of a 4th- or 3rd-c. B.C. temple; this, in turn, forms the basis for speculative attempts to identify these remains as either the Temple of *Iuno Regina [in Aventino] or the Temple of *Iuppiter Libertas (Andreussi 126; Ziolkowski, admitting the crux). Yet the fuller evidence presented by Krautheimer does not support any of these interpretations, since the hypothesized “tempietto” conflicts with the presence of the second colonnade. The picture is further complicated by a sizeable ancient construction reported from the NW foundations of S. Sabina (Darsy 19-20; cf. Krautheimer 84,b: “remains of a monumental construction of tufa opus quadratum”; Coarelli ponders the possibility of a major temple). Thus, the situation is hardly resolvable at present; our map marks only the position of the two colonnades.