At Rome
A grove sacred to Egeria in connection with Numa stood close by a busy gate of Rome, the Porta Capena, near where the Baths of Caracalla were built in the third century. In the second century, when Herodes Atticus recast an inherited villa nearby as a great landscaped estate, the natural grotto was formalized as an arched interior with an apsidal end where a statue of Egeria once stood in a niche; the surfaces were enriched with revetments of green and white marble facings and green porphyry flooring and friezes of mosaic. The primeval spring, one of dozens of springs that flow into the river Almone, was made to feed large pools, one of which was known as Lacus Salutaris or "Lake of Health". Juvenal regretted an earlier phase of architectural elaboration:
- Nymph of the Spring! More honour’d hadst thou been,
- If, free from art, an edge of living green,
- Thy bubbling fount had circumscribed alone,
- And marble ne’er profaned the native stone.
The ninfeo was a favored picnic spot for nineteenth-century Romans and can still be visited in the archaeological park of the Caffarella, between the Appian Way and the even more ancient Via Latina.
Read more about this topic: Egeria (mythology)
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“The old world stands serenely behind the new, as one mountain yonder towers behind another, more dim and distant. Rome imposes her story still upon this late generation.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)