Domus Nasonis

This private house, dating back to Augustan times, may have been the home of the great poet Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid). We know his house in Rome was near the Capitoline Hill, since he describes looking up at the Capitol by moonlight on his last night in Rome:

    iamque quiescebant uoces hominumque canumque 
       Lunaque nocturnos alta regebat equos. 
    hanc ego suspiciens et ad hanc Capitolia cernens, 
       quae nostro frustra iuncta fuere Lari, . . . 

"And now the voices of men and dogs were growing quiet, and the Moon was guiding her nocturnal horses on high. Looking up at her and seeing by her light the Capitoline temples, which were (all in vain) close to my household gods, . . ."

Ovid was preparing to leave for Tomis on the Black Sea, where he had been exiled by Augustus for offending the emperor because of carmen et error. The poem was Ars Amatoria, "The Art of Love," but we will never know exactly what the "mistake" was. Ovid was never to return to his beloved Rome, but the epitaph that he composed for himself while at Tomis is inscribed on the wall of this room. An adjoining room, the Thesaurus of Ovid, provides an appropriate place to discuss the works of this poet, unfortunate in life but vindicated in death by the undying fame of his poetry.