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

Villa of Nennig

VillaGallia Belgica · Nennig, Perl, Saarland, GermanyBuilt 80 CE

About

A modest Roman farmhouse rose at Nennig, on the Moselle across from Remich, during the 1st century CE, one of many estates supplying Trier's hinterland. Coins, fibulae, and pottery recovered from the earliest layers date this first building phase. Decades later, around 200 CE, the property was rebuilt into a palatial villa whose floor bore the gladiator mosaic now ranked among the most important Roman artworks north of the Alps, its 160-square-meter surface crowded with musicians, hunters, and armed fighters. In 117 CE only the earlier, simpler farmhouse stood on the site; the grand villa and its famous mosaic still lay roughly eighty years in the future.

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.