Sidi Ghrib Villa
About
Archaeologists surveying near Borj El Amri in 1975 found a rural estate with its own bath complex covering 780 square meters around a colonnaded frigidarium. Builders raised the villa in the late 4th or early 5th century AD, roughly three hundred years after Trajan died, alongside olive presses that show it also worked as a farm. Its best-known mosaic shows the lady of the house at her toilette, flanked by maids holding a mirror and jewels. That mosaic now hangs in the Bardo Museum in Tunis.
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
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