Villa Romana del Casale (Piazza Armerina)
About
The Villa Romana del Casale is Sicily's largest and best-preserved Roman villa, its 3,500 square metres of still-vivid mosaics including the famous Bikini Girls athletes floor laid across more than 60 rooms. That grand palace was built in the early 4th century, around 310 to 340 CE, after an earthquake destroyed an earlier, far plainer rustic villa on the same hillside. Archaeologists traced that earlier building back to the 1st century CE, meaning a modest working Roman farm villa stood on this spot in 117 CE, not the mosaic palace later Roman elites would enjoy. On the day Trajan died, a plain countryside farmhouse occupied the site; the palace of colonnades and hunting mosaics familiar today lay two centuries 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.
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 →