Villa Romana del Casale History

The villa, with its over 3500 sqm (4200 sqyd) of mosaic pavements, offers the most extraordinary and wide known text of mosaic decoration that, for the complexity of its iconographic apparatus, is not comparable to the mosaics of the Roman Tunisian villas. The mastery, which between the III and IV century AD provided to the empire the most flourishing schools of mosaic decoration, was African. Therefore, on the base of stratigraphic data, confirmed by historical and literary sources, the dating of the villa has been fixed within the 340 AD. By the monumental entrance (south side), made up of a door with three arches and that had to be sure plastered, frescoed (some rest remains) and adorned with statues, it enters the complex. It accesses a colonnade and a courtyard that leads to the quadrangular portico (north-west side) or to the thermal quarter (west side). From the courtyard it reaches, through two dressing rooms, the gymnasium of which mosaic decoration evokes a race between quadrigae set in the Circus Maximum of Rome. From here it accesses the frigidarium with its octagonal plan with seven exedra niches of which the southern one has three apses and the north one is an psidal swimming pool. The niches decorations represent vestizione and ablution scenes, while the frigidarium represent marine scenes, the two bathtubs with walls and pavements covered with marbles. From the frigidarium it enters the tepidarium and therefore the calidarium which manifests the heating system with suspensurae and praefurni.