Roman villa – Wikipedia

typology and distribution [edit ]

Pliny the Elder ( 23–79 AD ) distinguished two kinds of villas near Rome : the villa urbana, a country seat that could easily be reached from Rome ( or another city ) for a night or two ; and the villa rustica, the farmhouse estate permanently occupied by the servants who by and large had charge of the estate. [ citation needed ] The Roman Empire contained many kinds of villas, not all of them extravagantly appointed with mosaic floors and frescoes. In the provinces, any country house with some cosmetic features in the Roman stylus may be called a “ villa ” by modern scholars. [ 1 ] Some were pleasure houses, like Hadrian ‘s Villa at Tivoli, that were sited in the cool hills within easy reach of Rome or, like the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, on picturesque sites overlooking the Bay of Naples. Some villas were more like the country houses of England, the visible seat of ability of a local baron, such as the celebrated palace rediscovered at Fishbourne in Sussex .
Suburban villas on the edge of cities besides occurred, such as the Middle and deep Republican villa that encroached on the Campus Martius, at that time on the edge of Rome, and which can be besides seen outside the city walls of Pompeii. These early suburban villas, such as the one at Rome ‘s Parco della Musica [ 2 ] or at Grottarossa in Rome, demonstrate the antiquity and heritage of the villa suburbana in Central Italy. [ 3 ] It is possible [ original research? ] that these early, suburban villas were besides in fact the seats of power of regional strongmen or heads of authoritative families ( gentes ). A third base type of villa provided the organizational kernel of the large holdings called latifundia, which produced and exported agricultural produce ; such villas might lack luxuries. By the fourth hundred, “ villa ” could merely connote an agricultural hold : Jerome translated in the Gospel of Mark ( xiv, 32 ) chorion, describing the olive grove of Gethsemane, with villa, without an inference that there were any dwellings there at all. [ 4 ] Under the Empire, a concentration of imperial villas grew up near the Bay of Naples, particularly on the isle of Capri, at Monte Circeo on the seashore and at Antium ( Anzio ). [ citation needed ] Wealthy Romans escaped the summer heat in the hills around Rome, specially around Frascati ( cf. Hadrian ‘s Villa ). Cicero allegedly possessed no fewer than seven villas, the oldest of them, which he inherited, near Arpinum in Latium. Pliny the Younger had three or four, of which the case near Laurentium is the best known from his descriptions .

architecture of the villa complex [edit ]

By the first hundred BC, the “ classic ” villa took many architectural forms, with many examples employing atrium or peristyle, for insert spaces open to light and atmosphere. Upper class, affluent Roman citizens in the countryside around Rome and throughout the Empire lived in villa complexes, the accommodation for rural farms. The villa-complex consist of three parts : [ 5 ]

• the pars urbana where the owner and his family lived. This would be similar to the wealthy-person’s in the city and would have painted walls.[6]
• the pars rustica where the chef and slaves of the villa worked and lived. This was also the living quarters for the farm’s animals. There would usually be other rooms here that might be used as store rooms, a hospital and even a prison.
• the villa fructuaria would be the storage rooms. These would be where the products of the farm were stored ready for transport to buyers. Storage rooms here would have been used for oil, wine, grain, grapes and any other produce of the villa. Other rooms in the villa might include an office, a temple for worship, several bedrooms, a dining room and a kitchen.

Villas were frequently furnished with plumb washup facilities and many would have had an under-floor central heating known as the hypocaust. [ 7 ]

Social history [edit ]

A villa might be quite palatial, such as the villa of the imperial menstruation, built on seaside slopes overlooking the Gulf of Naples at Baiae ; others were preserved at Stabiae and Herculaneum by the ashfall and mudslide from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79, which besides preserved the Villa of the Papyri and its library. Smaller in the countryside, even non-commercial villas operated as largely self-supporting units, with consort farms, olive groves, and vineyards. Roman writers refer with atonement to the autonomy of their villas, where they drank their own wine and pressed their own oil, a normally used literary topos. An ideal Roman citizen was the freelancer farmer tilling his own land, and the agrarian writers wanted to give their readers a find to link themselves with their ancestors through this double of self-sufficient villas. The truth was not besides far from the image, either, while even the profit-oriented latifundia, large slave-run villas, probably grew enough of all the basic foodstuffs to provide for their own pulmonary tuberculosis. The late Roman Republic witnessed an explosion of villa structure in Italy, specially in the years following the dictatorship of Sulla ( 81 BC ). In Etruria, the villa at Settefinestre was the center of one of the latifundia that were involved in large-scale agrarian production. [ 8 ] At Settefinestre and elsewhere, the cardinal housing of such villas was not high appointed. other villa in the backwoods of Rome are interpreted in faint of the agrarian treatises written by the elder Cato, Columella and Varro, all of whom sought to define the suitable life style of cautious Romans, at least in ideal terms. boastfully villas dominated the rural economy of the Po Valley, Campania, and Sicily, and besides operated in Gaul. Villas were centers of a variety of economic action such as mining, pottery factories, or knight raising such as those found in northwestern Gaul. [ 9 ] Villas specialize in the seagoing export of olive petroleum to Roman legions in Germany became a feature of the southerly iberian state of Hispania Baetica. [ 10 ] Some deluxe villas have been excavated in North Africa in the provinces of Africa and Numidia. [ 11 ] Certain areas within easy reach of Rome offered cool lodgings in the heat of summer. Gaius Maecenas asked what kind of house could possibly be suitable at all seasons. The emperor Hadrian had a villa at Tibur ( Tivoli ), in an area that was popular with Romans of rank and file. Hadrian ‘s Villa, dated to 123, was more like a palace, as Nero ‘s palace, the Domus Aurea on the Palatine Hill in Rome, was disposed in groupings in a planned bumpkinly landscape, more like a villa. Cicero had several villas. Pliny the Younger described his villa in his letters. The Romans invented the seaside villa : a sketch in a fresco rampart at the House of Marcus Lucretius Fronto [ it ] in Pompeii hush shows a row of seafront joy houses, all with porticos along the battlefront, some rising up in amphiprostylar tiers to an altana at the lead that would catch a breeze on the most sultry evenings. [ 12 ]
late Roman owners of villas had luxuries like hypocaust -heated rooms with mosaics

Some late Roman villae had luxuries like hypocaust -heated rooms with mosaic floors ; mosaics are known evening from Roman Britain. As the Roman Empire collapsed, villas in Britain were abandoned. In early areas some at least survived ; big working villas were donated by aristocrats and territorial magnates to individual monks, frequently to become the nucleus of celebrated monasteries. In this room, the villa arrangement of late Antiquity was preserved into the early on Middle Ages. Benedict of Nursia established his influential monastery of Monte Cassino in the ruins of a villa at Subiaco that had belonged to Nero. Around 590, Saint Eligius was born in a highly placed Gallo-Roman family at the ‘villa ‘ of Chaptelat near Limoges, in Aquitaine. The abbey at Stavelot was founded ca 650 on the world of a former villa near Liège and the abbey of Vézelay had a exchangeable establish. a late as 698, Willibrord established an abbey at a Roman villa of Echternach, in Luxembourg near Trier, which Irmina of Oeren, daughter of Dagobert II, king of the Franks, presented to him .

Villas in Roman Gaul [edit ]

As the empire expanded, villas circulate into the western provinces, including Gaul and Roman Britain. This was despite the fact that writers of the period could never quite decide on what was meant by villa, though it is clear from the treatise of Palladius that the villa had an agrarian and political role. In Roman Gaul the terminus villa was applied to many different buildings. [ 13 ] The villas in Roman Gaul were besides subject to regional differences, for case in northern and central Gaul colonnaded facades and pavilions were the manner, whereas Southern Gaul were in peristyle. The villa dash, locations, board numbers and proximity to a lake or ocean were manners of displaying the owners wealth. [ 14 ] Villas were besides centres of production, and Gallo-Roman villa look to have been closely associated with vineries and wine production. [ 15 ] The owners were credibly a combination of local Gallic elites who became quickly romanised after the conquest, equally well as Romans and Italians who wished to exploit deep local anesthetic resources. [ 16 ] The villa would have been the center of complex relationships with the local area. much work would have been undertaken by slave labour or by local coloni ( “ tenant farmers ” ). There would besides have been a shop steward in addition to the inhabiting class. [ 17 ]

Attested Roman villa [edit ]

See besides [edit ]

References [edit ]

further learn [edit ]