Aula Palatina
— — a single room that still holds an empire's hush.
Not only on a wall.
“Constantine's audience hall, set down in Trier around 310 AD and still standing. Sixty-seven metres long, thirty-three high, the largest single-room space the ancient world has left us. The Romans built it in plain brick, with no internal columns. Protestants have used it as a parish church since 1856. The interior keeps an austerity the photographs never quite catch.
Aula Palatina, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Aula Palatina, also called the Konstantinbasilika or Basilica of Constantine, is a Roman audience hall in Trier, on the Mosel river in western Germany. It was built around 310 AD as the throne hall of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, who used Trier as his northern imperial residence. The hall is part of the Roman Monuments of Trier, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1986. The interior measures sixty-seven metres long, twenty-seven wide, and thirty-three high, the largest extant single-room structure surviving from classical antiquity. It is now a Lutheran parish church.
The building is plain Roman brick on a stone footing, with no internal columns or aisles. The walls were originally faced inside with marble and warmed by a hypocaust system; both are gone, leaving the brick exposed. Two long rows of round-arched windows let in the light. After Constantine, the hall served as a bishop's palace, a Frankish royal seat, and an archbishop's residence; the Prussian crown converted it to a Protestant church in 1856. Allied bombing in 1944 destroyed the wooden roof and the interior fittings; the restoration in the early 1950s deliberately kept the brick stark.
Inside, the room is essentially empty. There are no side aisles, no rood screen, no painted programme. The simplicity is deliberate, both Roman and post-war: the audience hall was always meant to put the throne, and the visitor, into a single tall space, and the 1950s restoration honoured that. A small modern organ sits at the west end. The Lutheran Church of the Redeemer holds weekly services. On a quiet weekday afternoon the building reads more as a Roman survival than as a church, and the acoustics carry a footstep across the whole nave.