This edited volume, based on the first Williams Symposium on Classical Architecture, held at the University of Pennsylvania in April 1990, focuses on the theme of the well-appointed Roman country house. Using archaeological and textual evidence, the chapters address issues of villa composition, economy, and society. The volume also explores the possible reasons that Greeks did not embrace the villa lifestyle as the Romans so eagerly did. Finally, this book provides a promising foundation for future studies of the nature of the villa phenomenon. Contributors: Lisa Fentress, Chrystina Häuber, Adolf Hoffmann, Ann Kuttner, Hans Lauter, Guy Metraux, Richard Neudecker, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. Symposium Series 9 University Museum Monograph, 101
This volume offers a comprehensive survey of Roman villas in Italy and the Mediterranean provinces of the Roman Empire, from their origins to the collapse of the Empire. The architecture of villas could be humble or grand, and sometimes luxurious. Villas were most often farms where wine, olive oil, cereals, and manufactured goods, among other products, were produced. They were also venues for hospitality, conversation, and thinking on pagan, and ultimately Christian, themes. Villas spread as the Empire grew. Like towns and cities, they became the means of power and assimilation, just as infrastructure, such as aqueducts and bridges, was transforming the Mediterranean into a Roman sea. The distinctive Roman/Italian villa type was transferred to the provinces, resulting in Mediterranean-wide culture of rural dwelling and work that further unified the Empire.
Drawing on documentary sources and archaeological evidence this book offers a socio-economic history of elite villas in Roman Central Italy and brings a new perspective to the debate on the slave-based villa system and the crisis of Italian villas in the imperial period.
Between 1977 and 1984 the excavations of a Canadian archaeological team at San Giovanni di Ruoti in southern Italy uncovered a series of three Roman villas dating from the first to the sixth centuries AD. The multi-volume report on the excavation will provide the first comprehensive overview of the social and economic life of a Roman villa in southern Italy. Volume II constitutes a catalogue raisonTe of the small finds, covering all categories of non-ceramic personal, domestic, and industrial artifacts recovered from the site. C.J. Simpson has been a member of the Canadian excavation team since 1979. He provides detailed descriptions of the individual artifacts, their dates of manufacture, and their use, and discusses the evidence they yield for domestic and daily life. The artifacts range from hairpins and brooches to iron knives used for slicing and chopping. Coins and lamps found at the site are evaluated in separate contributions by R. Reece and J.J. Rossiter. The book includes several useful appendices, notably one by Vito Volterra on the analysis of millstones.The 400 items listed in the catalogue are illustrated by drawings or photographs. This volume presents one of very few accounts of the household artifacts found at an estate centre remote from urban Rome. It provides an important resource for specialists seeking to date similar objects, and adds much interesting detail to our picture of the rural economy of Italy in late antiquity.
"This is a stimulating book and should be compulsory reading for all students of Roman art." ---Classical Review "For all the authors, attention to the ensemble, a sense of the relation between the formal and the iconographic, and the desire to historicize their material contribute to making this anthology unusual in its rigorous and creative attention to the way that art and architecture participate in the construction of the image of the Roman elite." ---Art Bulletin Roman Art in the Private Sphere presents an impressive case for the social and art historical importance of the paintings, mosaics, and sculptures that filled the private houses of the Roman elite. The six essays in this volume range from the first century B.C.E. to the fourth century C.E., and from the Italian peninsula to the Eastern Empire and North African provinces. The essays treat works of art that belonged to every major Roman housing type: the single-family atrium houses and the insula apartment blocks in Italian cities, the dramatically sited villas of the Campanian coast and countryside, and the palatial mansions of late antique provincial aristocrats. In a complementary fashion the essays consider domestic art in relation to questions of decorum, status, wealth, social privilege, and obligation. Patrons emerge as actively interested in the character of their surroundings; artists appear as responsive to the desire of their patrons. The evidence in private art of homosexual conduct in high society is also set forth. Originality of subject matter, sophisticated appreciation of stylistic and compositional nuance, and philosophical perceptions of the relationship of humanity and nature are among the themes that the essays explore. Together they demonstrate that Roman domestic art must be viewed on its own terms. Elaine K. Gazda is Professor of the History of Art and Curator of Hellenistic and Roman Antiquities at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan.
This book offers an overview of the archaeological and structural evidence for one of the most vital periods of Italian history, spanning the late Roman and early medieval periods. The chronological scope covers the adoption of Christianity and the emergence of Rome as the seat of Western Christendom, the break-up of the Roman west in the face of internal decay and the settlement of non-Romans and Germanic groups, the impact of Germanic and Byzantine rule on Italy until the rise of Charlemagne and of a Papal State in the later eighth century. Presenting a detailed review and analysis of recent discoveries by archaeologists, historians, art historians, numismatists and architectural historians, Neil Christie identifies the changes brought about by the Church in town and country, the level of change within Italy under Rome before and after occupation by Ostrogoths, Byzantines and Lombards, and reviews wider changes in urbanism, rural exploitation and defence. The emphasis is on human settlement on its varied levels - town, country, fort, refuge - and the assessment of how these evolved and the changes that impacted on them. Too long neglected as a 'Dark Age', this book helps to further illuminate this fascinating and dynamic period of European history.
The broad valley of the Bradano river and its tributary, the Basentello, separates the Apennine mountains in Lucania from the limestone plateau of the Murge in Apulia in southeast Italy. This book aims to explain how the pattern of settlement and land use changed in the valley over the whole period from the Neolithic to the late medieval.
