Architectural models and urban planning. From Hadrian’s Villa maquette to the amphitheater of Caesarea of Mauretania (Cherchell)

During the restorations carried out between 1964 and 1972 of Hadrian’s Villa it was found a strange marble handmade, broken into various pieces that once assembled seemed to be a sort of maquette of a stadium. For many years scholars and researchers tried to guess and interpret its real function (an architectural model, a marble fountain, a game, etc.) but still remained some doubts. Thanks to a new research came out some relevant outputs: first of all, the handmade was a model of a building for spectacles (munera and venationes) that was never built inside the Villa, but the second result was even more interesting because it dealt with the architectural designing of a specific typology of buildings that we can find in almost all places visited by Hadrian during his reign: Cesarea of Mauretania (Cherchell, Algeria) , Virunum (Klagenfurt, Austria) Skythopolis (Beth-Shean, Israel), Lucera (Italia). The fragments of the marble model were surveyed by means of 3D laser scanner, and then optimized for the virtual assembling by means of reverse modeling tools. From the orthographic high resolution images of the model, together with relevant sections, it was possible to compare them with the ancient standard measures used during imperial age and we detected the presence of actus quadratus hidden inside the plan of the maquette. The modular structure for the dimensioning of the cavea allowed us to investigate also the design of Cherchell’s amphitheater and consequently understand the deep relation between architectural design and urban planning of this important capital of the Mauritanian province. The following step of the research is to deepen the knowledge of the amphitheater built in Cesarea during the reign of Juba II by means of a photogrammetric survey with the aim to understand its relation with the un-built amphitheater of Hadrian’s Villa