The so-called Temple of the Cough is a round Roman building on the old via Tiburtina in Tivoli, turned into a church in the tenth century. It stands near the Aniene, the sanctuary of Hercules Victor and the lower part of Villa d'Este, outside the Porta del Colle; beside it is an abandoned paper mill built on the structures of the sanctuary.
What to see
Its original purpose is not known for certain. An inscription suggests that it was built in the first half of the fourth century, under Constantine, on the ruins of a Roman villa of the first century BC, to commemorate work on the via Tiburtina. It has been described as a nymphaeum, an early Christian church, a temple of Venus or of the Sun, or a tomb of the gens Tuscia, from which the name «Tosse» would derive; the medieval idea of a temple to a goddess of the cough, or to the Madonna of the Cough, built to keep the illness away, is entirely unfounded. No find has confirmed any of these hypotheses.
The building is round and covered by a dome with an oculus, like that of the Pantheon, more than twelve metres in diameter. The brick body has two levels: the older one with the entrances and the later one with three large rectangular niches and four semicircular ones. Originally it probably had a mosaic floor and marble facing, as the holes for fixing the slabs show, and a lost cornice of which the corbels remain. In the tenth century it became a church dedicated to the Virgin, restored with material from the nearby sanctuary of Hercules; in the apses there remain early medieval frescoes of Christ Pantocrator and the Ascension, with a beardless Christ blessing in the Greek manner, a sign of Byzantine influence. It was probably abandoned in the seventeenth or eighteenth century.
Visiting
According to the sources the temple is being restored and stands on private property: the interior cannot be visited. Any openings should be checked.
Our editors' tip
The building rests on a base made of the opus reticulatum remains of the first-century BC villa and of material reused from ancient buildings.
