Temple of Hercules Victor
— — twenty columns the river kept standing.
Not only on a wall.
“A small round temple in the Forum Boarium, the old cattle market on the bend of the Tiber between the Aventine and the Palatine. Twenty Corinthian columns hold a ring of Pentelic marble, the oldest marble building still standing in Rome. For centuries it was mistaken for a temple of Vesta. The traffic on Lungotevere keeps a steady distance. In the late afternoon the marble takes a soft honey colour from the river.
Temple of Hercules Victor, 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 Temple of Hercules Victor stands in the Forum Boarium on the east bank of the Tiber, the ancient cattle market of Rome at the foot of the Aventine. A ring of twenty Corinthian columns surrounds a circular cella, the whole built in Greek Pentelic marble around 120 BC and counted as the oldest surviving marble building in the city. Tradition attributes the dedication to Marcus Octavius Herrenus, a wealthy olive oil merchant. The tholos plan is unusual in Rome, where rectangular temples were the norm.
The marble itself is part of the story. The columns and entablature were quarried at Mount Pentelicon outside Athens — the same vein used for the Parthenon — and shipped to Rome at considerable expense, a statement of cultural alignment with the Greek world as much as religious offering. The cella wall preserves much of its original tufa core, with marble facing where time and reuse have not stripped it. The roof and original entablature are lost. The Corinthian capitals, weathered but legible, are still cut to fifth-century-BC Athenian proportion.
The temple stands in Piazza Bocca della Verità, a short walk south of the Capitoline along Via del Teatro di Marcello. It can be circled and photographed any time from the surrounding piazza without ticket or queue. The interior is rarely opened and only by arrangement with the Sovrintendenza Capitolina; most visits are exterior only. The neighbouring Temple of Portunus, rectangular and slightly older, sits a few steps away on the same lawn, and the Bocca della Verità portico of Santa Maria in Cosmedin closes the square.