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Roman villa

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: British History 1500 and
before (including Roman Britain)

   The Roman Empire contained many kinds of villas. Some were pleasure
   houses such as those like Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, that were sited in
   the cool hills within easy reach of Rome or on picturesque sites
   overlooking the Bay of Naples. Some villas were more like the country
   houses of Early Modern England, France or Poland, the visible seat of
   power of a local magnate, such as the famous palace rediscovered at
   Fishbourne in Sussex. Suburban villas on the edge of cities were also
   known, such as the Middle and Late Republican villas that encroached on
   the Campus Martius, at that time on the edge of Rome, and which can be
   also seen outside the city walls of Pompeii. These early suburban
   villas, such as the one at Rome's Auditorium site or at Grottarossa,
   demonstrate the antiquity and heritage of the villa suburbana in
   Central Italy. It is possible that these early, suburban villas were
   also in fact the seats of power (maybe even palaces) of regional
   strongmen or heads of important families (gentes). A third type of
   villa provided the organizational centre of the large holdings called
   latifundia, that produced and exported agricultural produce; such
   villas might be lacking in luxuries. By the 4th century, villa could
   simply connote an agricultural holding: Jerome translated the Gospel of
   Mark (xiv, 32) chorion, describing the olive grove of Gethsemane, with
   villa, without an inference that there were any dwellings there at all
   (Catholic Encyclopedia "Gethsemane").

   The late Roman Republic witnessed an explosion of villa construction in
   Italy. In Etruria, the villa at Settefinestre has been interpreted as
   being one of the latifundia, or large slave-run villas, that were
   involved in large-scale agricultural production. Other villas in the
   hinterland of Rome are interpreted in light of the agrarian treatises
   written by the elder Cato, Columella and Varro, both of whom sought to
   define the suitable lifestyle of conservative Romans, at least in
   idealistic terms.

   By the first century B.C., the "classic" villa had a widespread
   architectural form with many examples showing the use of
   atrium/peristyle architecture. This explosion of construction takes
   place especially in the years following the dictatorship of Sulla. A
   villa might be quite palatial, such as the imperial villas built on
   seaside slopes around the Bay of Naples such as at Baiae; others were
   preserved at Stabiae and Herculaneum by the ashfall and mudslide from
   the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., which also preserved the Villa of
   the Papyri and its libraries. Deeper in the countryside, villas were
   largely self-supporting with associated farms, olive groves, and
   vineyards. Large villas dominated the rural economy of the Po valley,
   Campania, and Sicily, and were also found in Gaul. Villas specializing
   in the sea-going export of olive oil to Roman legions in Germany were a
   feature of the southern Iberian province of Hispania Baetica. Some
   luxurious villas have been excavated in North Africa in the provinces
   of Africa and Numidia, or at Fishbourne in Britannia.

   Certain areas within easy reach of Rome offered cool lodgings in the
   heat of summer. Maecenas asked what kind of house could possibly be
   suitable at all seasons. The emperor Hadrian had a villa at Tibur (
   Tivoli), in an area that was popular with Romans of rank. Hadrian's
   Villa ( 123 AD) was more like a palace. Cicero had several villas.
   Pliny the Younger described his villas in his letters. The Romans
   invented the seaside villa: a vignette in a frescoed wall at the house
   of Lucretius Fronto in Pompeii still shows a row of seafront pleasure
   houses, all with porticos along the front, some rising up in porticoed
   tiers to an altana at the top that would catch a breeze on the most
   stifling evenings (Veyne 1987 ill. p 152)
   Late Roman owners of villae had luxuries like hypocaust-heated rooms
   with mosaics
   Late Roman owners of villae had luxuries like hypocaust-heated rooms
   with mosaics

   Late Roman owners of villae had luxuries like hypocaust-heated rooms
   with mosaics ( La Olmeda, Spain). As the Roman Empire collapsed in the
   4th and 5th centuries, the villas were more and more isolated and came
   to be protected by walls. Though in England the villas were abandoned,
   looted, and burned by Anglo-Saxon invaders in the 5th century, other
   areas had large working villas donated by aristocrats and territorial
   magnates to individual monks that often became the nucleus of famous
   monasteries. In this way, the villa system of late Antiquity was
   preserved into the early Medieval period. Saint Benedict established
   his influential monastery of Monte Cassino in the ruins of a villa at
   Subiaco that had belonged to Nero; there are fuller details at the
   entry for Benedict. Around 590, Saint Eligius was born in a
   highly-placed Gallo-Roman family at the 'villa' of Chaptelat near
   Limoges, in Aquitaine (now France). The abbey at Stavelot was founded
   ca 650 on the domain of a former villa near Liège and the abbey of
   Vézelay had a similar founding. As late as 698, Willibrord established
   an abbey at a Roman villa of Echternach, in Luxemburg near Trier, which
   was presented to him by Irmina, daughter of Dagobert II, king of the
   Franks.

   Some of the known Roman villas are:
     * Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, Italy
     * Fishbourne Roman Palace in West Sussex, England
     * Lullingstone villa in Kent, England
     * Villa Romana del Casale in Piazza Armerina, Sicily, Italy
     * Chedworth Roman Villa in Gloucestershire

Architecture of the villa complex

   Upper class, wealthy Roman Citizens in the countryside around Rome and
   throughout the Empire lived in villa-complexes, the accommodation for
   rural farms.

   The villa-complex consisted of three parts.

   The "Villa Urbana" where the owner and his family lived. This would be
   similar to the wealthy-person's domus in the city and would have
   painted walls and artistic mosaics on the floors.

   The "Villa Rustica" where the staff and slaves of the villa worked and
   lived. This was also the living quarters for the farms animals. There
   would usually be other rooms here that might be used as store rooms, a
   hospital and even a prison!

   The third part of the villa-complex would be the storage rooms. These
   would be where the products of the farm were stored ready for transport
   to buyers. Storage rooms here would have been used for Oil, Wine,
   Grain, Grapes and any other produce of the villa. Other rooms in the
   villa might include an office, a temple for worship, several bedrooms,
   a dining room and a kitchen.

   Villas were often plumbed with running water and many would have had
   under-floor central heating known as a " hypocaust".

   A villa was originally a Roman country house built for the upper class.
   According to Pliny the Elder, there were two kinds of villas: the villa
   urbana, which was a country seat that could easily be reached from Rome
   (or another city) for a night or two, and the villa rustica, the
   farm-house estate permanently occupied by the servants who had charge
   generally of the estate. It would centre on the villa itself, perhaps
   only seasonally occupied. There were a concentration of Imperial villas
   near the Bay of Naples, especially on the Isle of Capri, at Monte
   Circeo on the coast and at Antium ( Anzio). Wealthy Romans escaped the
   summer heat in the hills round Rome, especially around Frascati (cf
   Hadrian's Villa). Cicero is said to have possessed no less than seven
   villas, the oldest of which was near Arpinum, which he inherited. Pliny
   the Younger had three or four, of which the example near Laurentium is
   the best known from his descriptions.

   Roman writers refer with satisfaction to the self-sufficiency of their
   villas, where they drank their own wine and pressed their own oil, a
   commonly used literary topos. An ideal Roman citizen was the
   independent farmer tilling his own land, and the agricultural writers
   wanted to give their readers a chance to link themselves with their
   ancestors through this image of self-sufficient villas. The truth was
   not too far from it, either, while even the profit-oriented latifundia
   probably grew enough of all the basic foodstuffs to provide for their
   own consumption. Even the 'monoculture' farms, concentrating [[desunt
   multa]]

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