Temple of Bellona (Rome)

The temple of Bellona was an ancient Roman temple dedicated to the goddess Bellona and sited next to the Temple of Apollo Sosianus and the Theatre of Marcellus in Rome.

It was first vowed in 296 BC by Appius Claudius Caecus during the third Samnite War, in the area of the later circus Flaminius, outside the pomerium but close to the Servian Wall (allowing it to accommodate extraordinary meetings of the Senate which involved foreign embassies from non-allies or returning or departing generals, neither of which were allowed within the pomerium - for example, the farewell to the proconsul on his departure for his allotted province). Appius's descendent Appius Claudius Pulcher (the consul of 79 BC) rehoused the imagines clipeatae ("images on shields") of his ancestors there, to advertise his descent from its founder.

The temple - long considered lost - was identified with the remains of a podium recovered in the 1930s building works to enable the nearby Theatre to be seen in isolation. These remains belong to a reconstruction in the Augustan period which is not mentioned by the literary sources but is probably related to the transformation of the area during the construction of the Theatre at that time. Augustus (with links to the temple's founders via his Claudian wife) may have funded the rebuilding, or the dedicator may have been yet another Appius Claudius Pulcher (consul of 38 BC, conqueror of the Hirpini and loyal ally and father-in-law to Augustus).

These podium remains are made up of the cement infill between the load-bearing structures. (Those structures were constructed from opus quadratum blocks, looted for reuse after the temple was abandoned and now lost.) The structure of the church of Santa Rita da Cascia in Campitelli by Carlo Maderno was moved onto this podium from the slopes of the Capitol at the time of the 1930s excavation and work on the Capitol.

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