Digital Reconstruction of the Maritime Theatre in Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli

The research we present in this paper is about the geometrical analysis and the digital reconstruction of the Maritime Theatre in Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, based on the comparison with the interpretations of it gave by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Andrea Palladio, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Pierre Jérôme Honoré Daumet, Luigi Canina, and some other important architects, but above all the description of Mathias Ueblacker, that in 1985 published a very interesting survey and hypothesis of the initial configuration of this architecture. Inside the great place of the Hadrian’s Villa, the Maritime Theatre has a very unusual form, because of the circle in which it is collocated, but also an unknown function, as we do not known what was the finality of this space, and considering that the name was given by the people that discovered the ruins. Realized probably between 120 and 125 B.C. it has a very rich geometrical configuration, with some specific forms inside the round enclosure of columns that surround the water pool. The aim of the research was to reconstruct the actual configuration of it and the hypothesis of reconstruction made by Ueblacker, in both cases with digital technology, in order to have a comparison between the two levels of representation. A final video was realized to show, in an explicit way, the results of the experimentation.