Villa Diomedis

About

Built outside Pompeii's Herculaneum Gate in the final decades of the Republic, this villa ranked among the largest private residences near Pompeii, its garden framed by a colonnaded portico on three sides. It took its modern name from Marcus Arrius Diomedes, whose tomb stood across the road, though nothing ties him to actual ownership. Bourbon excavators cleared it between 1771 and 1774, among the earliest large-scale digs at Pompeii. Vesuvius buried the villa on 24 August 79 CE, 38 years before this map's snapshot.

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.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_of_Diomedes