page_title: Egeria (mythology)
section_title: Egeria spring in Rome
hierarchical_section_title: Egeria (mythology) / Egeria spring in Rome
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Ninfeo d'Egeria al Parco della Caffarella a Roma.
context_page_description: Egeria was a nymph attributed a legendary role in the early history of Rome as a divine consort and counselor of Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, to whom she imparted laws and rituals pertaining to ancient Roman religion. Her name is used as an eponym for a female advisor or counselor.
context_section_description: A spring and a grove once sacred to Egeria stand close to a gate of Rome, the Porta Capena. Its waters were dedicated to the exclusive use of the Vestals.  The ninfeo, a favored picnic spot for nineteenth-century Romans, can still be visited in the archaeological park of the Caffarella, between the Appian Way and the even more ancient Via Latina, nearby the Baths of Caracalla (a later construction).
  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.
caption: Apse of the Ninfeo d'Egeria,  Parco Cafarella, Rome
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