Among the remnants of interior decoration in the Roman Imperial palace at Baia are the stuccoed vaults of three rooms, the so-called ‘Stanze di Venere’, which attracted the attention of innumerable travellers and antiquaries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first and second rooms, respectively pavilion-vaulted and barrel-vaulted, retain enough of their stucco-work to justify a close study of design and subject-matter; while even in the third room, where only a few fragments survive, some figures and ornaments can be discerned. Further information about the decorations is supplied by unpublished drawings carried out in the early eighteenth century. Dating is difficult, but stylistic evidence suggests that the stucco-work of room 1, which belongs to the original phase of the complex, dates to Augustan times. The other two decorations are later, but no later than the Flavio-Trajanic period, for then or soon afterwards new structures were built at a higher level and the three rooms were turned into cisterns. The decorative programme in both 1 and 2 is primarily Dionysiac but also embodies references to the sports of the palaestra and to bathing, themes which lend weight to the idea that the chambers formed part of a bath-suite.