Villa Romana del
Casale
 Villa
del Casale is located about 3 km (1.8 miles) far from Piazza
Armerina, a town in the province of Enna, Sicily - Italy. This rich
villa was recently recognized World Heritage Site by Unesco.
Some columns and mosaics were already found early in the
19th century, but only after the excavations performed in 1929,
then in 1935-39 and 1950-60, the Villa del Casale was completely
uncovered. The late-Roman villa, whose owner was probably a member
of senatorial class or imperial family, the upper class of the Roman
Empire, has a defined planimetry consisting of four groups of rooms
with galleries, peristyles, courts and thermal areas: it’s
a big complex of buildings in which we find a pleasant sinuosity,
differences in level, exedras, stairs and asymmetries that obeyed
above all to a specific function. Villa Romana del Casale,
with its over 3500 sqm (4200 sqyd) of mosaic floor, is the most
extraordinary model of mosaic decoration art 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 the most flourishing schools of mosaic
art to the empire, 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. The wonderful mosaic
floor of the villa, really famous all over the world, shows different
aspects of Roman life, like the so called “Corridor of the
Great Hunt” and the “Bikini Room”. (next...)
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