Villa ad Gallinas Albas
About
Livia Drusilla, Augustus's third wife, owned this villa 12 kilometers north of Rome, known in antiquity as Ad Gallinas Albas ("at the white hens") after a legendary omen. Its underground summer dining room was painted floor to ceiling with a single continuous garden fresco, one of the best-preserved illusionistic paintings to survive from antiquity. The marble Augustus of Prima Porta statue was unearthed here in 1863. The villa remained imperial property through the 2nd century CE.
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.
In ancient writing
- Suetonius, Galba 1
An eagle drops a white hen with a laurel sprig in its beak into Livia's lap at her villa on the Flaminia; the laurel grove grown from it supplied the crowns of every Julio-Claudian triumph.
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 15.136–137
Tells the same story and adds that the villa took its name from the hens — ad Gallinas Albas.
Sources
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 →