House of the Cascade
About
Utica's House of the Cascade took its name from a fountain in a northern room, its basin paved with Eros fishing from a boat amid darting fish. Dated to the first or second century, the mosaic predates comparable fishing scenes elsewhere in Roman Africa by roughly a century. The house filled most of insula II, its rooms arranged around a central courtyard. No inscription names an owner, but its scale suggests a family enriched by Utica's fish trade.
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
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