Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Roman villa
Summary
A Roman villa was typically a farmhouse or country house in the territory of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, sometimes reaching extravagant proportions.
Nevertheless, the term "Roman villa" generally covers buildings with the common features of being rural (i.e. located outside urban settlements unlike the domus) and residential, with accommodation for the owner. The definition also changed with time: the earliest examples are mostly humble farmhouses in Italy, while from the Republican period a range of larger building types are included.
Villa RusticaLatifundium and Villa Otium
The present meaning of "villa" is partially based on the fairly numerous ancient Roman written sources since most archaeological remains are poorly preserved.
The most detailed ancient text on the meaning of "villa" is by Varro dating from the end of the Republican period, which is used for most modern considerations.
The Romans built many kinds of villas and any country house with some decorative features in the Roman style may be called a "villa" by modern scholars.
Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) distinguished two kinds of villas: the villa urbana, an estate situated in the country, in the suburbs of a town or within close vicinity to a city; and the villa rustica, a farmhouse estate usually associated with small-scale agriculture or viticulture. Examples of villae urbanae were the middle and late Republican villas that encroached on the Campus Martius, at that time on the edge of Rome, the one at Rome's Parco della Musica or at Grottarossa in Rome, and those outside the city walls of Pompeii which demonstrate the antiquity and heritage of the villa urbana in Central Italy.
A third type of villa was an organisational centre of the large holdings called latifundia, which produced and exported agricultural produce; such villas might lack luxuries.
Under the Empire, many patrician villas were built on the coasts near the Bay of Naples, especially on the isle of Capri, at Circeii and at Antium.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.