Villa Poppaeana
About
This luxury residence at Oplontis, traditionally linked to Poppaea Sabina, Nero's second wife, covered its walls in some of the finest Second Style frescoes surviving from Roman antiquity. An earthquake in 62 CE damaged it badly enough that repair crews were still working when Vesuvius erupted on 24 August 79 CE, burying the site mid-reconstruction. Excavation uncovered an unfinished swimming pool 61 meters long, the largest known from any Roman villa. UNESCO listed Oplontis alongside Pompeii and Herculaneum in 1997.
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
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 →