Villa - Roman

Roman

In ancient Roman architecture a villa was originally a country house built for the elite. According to Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, there were several 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 that was permanently occupied by the servants who had charge generally of the estate, which would centre on the villa itself, perhaps only seasonally occupied. The Roman villae rusticae at the heart of latifundia were the earliest versions of what later and elsewhere became called plantations. Not included as villae were the domus, a city house for the elite and privileged classes; and insulae, blocks of apartment buildings for the rest of the population. In Satyricon Petronius described the wide range of Roman dwellings. Another type of villae is the "villa marittima", a seaside villa, located on the coast.

There were a concentration of Imperial villas on the Gulf of Naples, on the Isle of Capri, at Monte Circeo and at Antium (Anzio). Examples are the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum; and the "Villa of the Mysteries" and "Villa of the Vettii" in Pompeii.

Wealthy Romans also escaped the summer heat in the hills round Rome, especially around Tibur (Tivoli) and Frascati, such as at Hadrian's Villa. Cicero is said to have possessed no fewer 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 latifundium villas, where they drank their own wine and pressed their own oil. This was an affectation of urban aristocrats playing at being old-fashioned virtuous Roman farmers, but the economic independence of later rural villas was a symptom of the increasing economic fragmentation of the Roman Empire.