Alle origini di un tipo architettonico fra Roma, il mondo greco e il ‘laboratorio Lazio’ del tardo ellenismo

In the wake of the publication of the nymphaeum of Q. Mutius in Segni, one can retrace, on the basis of some new acquisitions and reflections, the traces that, from the Hellenistic world, and perhaps Alexandrian in particular, seem to lead to the sudden appearance in the cities of “Roman” Italy of the 2nd century BC of some architectural types linked to the monumentalization of water. Thus, starting from Lazio and the Palestrina dossier, it seems possible to follow this process starting from the early development of the nymphaeums, a type capable of offering the clearest connections with the Greek experience. In the same period of time, the chamber nymphaeums seem to find rapid and wide diffusion, built in individual cases in precise monumental forms whose diffusion marks, like other architectural typologies, a bridge between the Latins and the foederati. Finally, on this dual line of experience is grafted the elaboration of the type, both architectural and decorative, of the nymphaeum with a chamber with walls divided into niches and decorated with rustic mosaic, a type that finds its complete and accomplished codification in the monument signed by Q. Mutius at the end of the 2nd century BC. The elaboration of these types is a splendid example, in the architectural field and in the broader and better-known phenomenon of the renewal of urban planning during the 2nd century BC, of the process of creation of that late-Hellenistic language that, generally thought of in a purely “dual” perspective in the dialectic between Rome and the Greek world, seems today to show a plurality of centers of elaboration. Among these, certainly, the cities of the “Lazio del Calcare” play an extremely important role, but important signs of participation are also given by various allied communities.