Posted by Haley Topper on Wednesday, May 17, 2017 in 2017 Blog post.

For one of our site visits, we went to Piazza Armerina and got to tour Villa Romana del Casale, a villa built in the 4th Century. Although we have seen so many incredible sites on this trip, I still have trouble really understanding that what I am looking at was built so long ago. When thinking about the temples, and this villa in particular, it seems impossible that something so grand could have been built so long ago.

The first thing our tour-guide pointed out to us that was, typically, roman houses are symmetrical, however, this villa is clearly not. He explained that it was because this house was not built in 30 years, but rather over a long period of time as additions were built on. One of the first things we saw were the baths in the villa. There were separate rooms for the different rooms: Calidarium (hot room), Tepidarium (warm room), and frigidarium (cool room). The heating system of the greek and roman baths are incredibly innovative in my opinion, and I was very impressed that they were able to come up with they system. Essentially, the floor of the bath would be raised using tiles (which you can see here), and warm air would be sent under the floor, heating the room as well as the walls which had hollow tubes in them to help carry the hot air. What I thought was most interesting was the fact that they used baths for business! Now a days, most business is done either in the office or over a meal, not over something that was supposed to be relaxing (like the bath). Although I guess this makes them very smart as well. If you’re trying to make a business deal, having your guest be very comfortable and relaxed may make them more likely to accept the deal you are proposing.

Additionally, we got to see all of the mosaics that were in the house. One interesting fact is that the different mosaics describe what the different rooms are for. For instance, servants’ rooms or passing rooms would typically have mosaics that are geometric shapes, while rooms with a purpose would have mosaics that depict that purpose. This shows the incredble amount of thought that went into the design of this villa, and our tour-guide said that the mosaics that depict scenes would take up to 14 days to make, and the geometric ones up to 7 days. My favorite mosaic was the ones of animals in the large center room of the villa. Our tour-guide explained that the purpose of making mosaics of many different animals was to make the inhabitant of the villa look smarter. Because those coming to visit may not know what a certain animal is, it makes the owner of the villa look smart when he can answer and describe the animal. This would also help business deals because the owner would appear to be more educated and therefore someone people would want to do business with.

In general, I feel like we have taken a step back with design in modern times after seeing the designs of this villa. With such little technology, the romans were able to construct intricate mosaics with up to 36 different colors, each room having a different purpose and picture. Now a days, we just have simple tile flooring, rugs, or wood flooring that covers each room uniformly. You would think that if the villas could be so detail oriented, intricate, and beautiful that we would have made even more advancements in our housing today, but to me, it seems like we have taken steps backwards because everything now is so modern and minimalistic.