Maison Carrée - France

World Heritage fans had to wait a long time to get to know the new classified sites of 2022 and 2023. Last month we finally got to update our UNESCO lists with new 42 sites. France inscribed 3 sites. I was lucky to had 1 of them and Óscar kindly offer to send a postcard of the Maison Carrée of Nîmes, one of the best preserved Roman temple of the world. 

 

The Maison Carrée is a Roman hexastyle pseudo peripatetic Corinthian temple, built during the lifetime of Augustus between 10 BC and the very beginning of the 1st century AD, the temple consists of thirty nine-metre high columns, twenty of which are engaged and enclose the cella (the inner room), preceded by a pronaos (the space designating the vestibule or entrance) accessed by a 17-step staircase. The stone used for its construction is a beautiful limestone from the Lens wood. Raised on a podium with a frontal staircase, the Maison Carrée dominated its environment and was originally located on the Roman forum in the center of an esplanade surrounded by porticos now disappeared but whose precise statement we keep. 

Photo: Formica

The Maison Carrée de Nîmes is the only and oldest representative of the Augustan Corinthian order still in elevation, having preserved intact all its decor. With its exceptional frieze decorated with scrolls of acanthus leaves, it is also with the Pantheon in Rome, the best preserved temple in the Roman world making it one of the most important testimonies of the architecture and spread of imperial worship in the provinces of the Empire. 

The outstanding universal value of this property is based on the demonstration that the Maison Carrée  represents one of the oldest expressions, and best preserved of a Roman temple dedicated to imperial worship and that it is a monument of remarkable architectural quality which, by the historical circumstances of its creation, by the political importance of its consecration and the stylistic choices that presided over its construction, testifies to the values of lasting peace, harmony and prosperity that the Roman Empire promoted and sought to guarantee. in: https://lamaisoncarreedenimes.fr/