Carole Raddato, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

Villa Borg

VillaGallia Belgica · Borg, Perl, Saarland, GermanyBuilt 15 CE

About

Villa Borg began as a small timber farmhouse roughly 9 meters square, raised near the Nied valley at the start of the 1st century CE. A stone building replaced it by mid-century, the first of four rebuilding phases archaeologists traced by finding each predecessor demolished down to its footings before the next version rose on top. A local schoolteacher named Johann Schneider first noticed the site's telltale mounds around 1900, though full excavation waited until the late 1980s. By 117 CE the estate had already stood in stone for roughly six decades, long before the reconstructed villa park opened to visitors in 1999.

What happened here

A working estate with a comfortable house attached, and the proportions vary with how rich the owner is and how often he visits. The farm side has presses for oil and wine, threshing floors, storage sunk into the ground, stables and quarters for the workforce. The residential side has baths, dining rooms sited for the view, mosaics, and a garden with water in it. A manager runs the place year-round and reports; the owner arrives for the vintage and for the summer. Produce goes to market or to the owner's town house, and the accounts are kept in detail. Some villas are pure retreat with no farm at all, built on a cliff or a lake specifically to be looked at from a boat.