House of the Black and White Triclinium
About
This house at Pupput, the seaside town Romans knew on the coast near modern Hammamet, centered on a dining room paved in black-and-white mosaic octagons, squares and hexagons laid out for three reclining couches. A curved marble basin punctuated the colonnaded garden court facing it. Builders raised the house in the late 2nd or early 3rd century AD, decades after this map's 117 CE snapshot. Rescue excavations recovered it in the 1960s during hotel construction along Hammamet's coast.
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
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →