The Domus Aurea was the urban villa that the emperor Nero built after the devastating fire that destroyed much of the center of Rome in 64 AD. The destruction of a large part of the urban center allowed the emperor to expropriate a total area of about 80 hectares and build a palace that extended between the Palatine, Esquiline and Celio hills. For its beauty and richness it went down in history with the name of Domus Aurea. The villa consisted of a series of buildings separated by gardens, woods and vineyards and an artificial lake, located in the valley where the Colosseum stands today. The main nuclei of the palace were located on the Palatine Hill and on the Oppian Hill and were famous for the sumptuous decoration in which gold and precious stone coatings were added to stuccoes, paintings and colored marbles. The parts that can be visited today are those on the Oppio hill: rooms probably intended for parties and banquets that were buried remaining unknown until the Renaissance. Only then, after some fortuitous discoveries, artists passionate about antiquity such as Pinturicchio, Ghirlandaio, Raffaello and Giulio Romano began to descend from above into those "underground caves", to copy the decorative motifs that they preserved and that, precisely from their location, they took the name of "grotesque".