I went to Tivoli in April 2015. Making efficient use of the four day Easter weekend involved flying to Rome Fiumicino early on Good Friday, where we met up with some friends fresh from the centre of Rome. We hired a car and drove straight to Tivoli, where we would spend a night and visit two WHSs.

The Villa Adriana is really more of a small town, created in large part by the emperor Hadrian, who was a keen amateur architect, in the second century AD. He decided that an out-of-town retreat would be just the thing he needed after he made himself less than universally popular in Rome by having several senators put to death. The site is a bit of a mishmash of buildings of various purposes, which include a grand villa, temples, a large bath house and the water feature known as the Canopus.

Around the Canopus Hadrian placed statues that he particularly wanted to show off to his visitors, such as a row of ‘Caryatids’ designed to imitate the female-form columns of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis. Hadrian was a philhellene, or an admirer of all things Greek, so he had numerous statues brought over or copied. He was possibly the first Roman emperor to sport a beard – not, as was cruelly suggested, to conceal acute acne, but because his heroes the Greek philosophers were similarly hirsute.

On the other side of the site we found the atmospheric Temple of Venus. This area has some of the best views of the Tiburtine Hills. There have been some significant finds at the Villa over the years that have ended up in major national collections across Europe, such as one of the best Roman copies of the lost Greek Discobolus statue, which you can see nowadays in the British Museum.