Villa San Marco
About
Villa San Marco sprawled across 11,000 square meters on the clifftop above Stabiae, built around a tetrastyle atrium in the Augustan age and enlarged with a colonnaded swimming pool under Claudius. Its owner has never been identified, though the scale of its peristyle gardens marks it as one of the largest villas on the Bay of Naples. Vesuvius buried it on 24 August 79 CE, ending its life as a residence 38 years before this map's snapshot — included, like Pompeii's Villa of the Mysteries, as part of the story the eruption erased.
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 →