Posted by pietro on Tuesday, May 16, 2017 in 2017 Blog post.

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We visited Piazza Armerina, an Italian commune in South Central Sicily, to visit the Villa Romana Del Casale.  Built in the fourth century AD, this massive atypical villa houses the largest collection of preserved Roman Mosaics in the world.  The unusual asymmetric shape of the villa is due to it having additional rooms added on after completion.  The first room of the villa, which I have included in the first picture above, is the bathhouse.  Complete with two separate rooms for men and women just as modern bathrooms are separated today, the excellent architects devised a system to provide hot water by driving hot air through pipes.  Some upper scale houses and hotels in America use a similar system to heat flooring.  Remnants of frescos decorated the outer walls of the bathhouse and adjacent rooms.  But the most beautiful and best preserved decorations are the mosaics that make up the flooring of the Villa.

The subjects of the mosaics are either geometric patterns or scenes of humans and animals.  Our tour guide, Mimo, mentioned the geometric patterns were typically made up of 10 colors and took an artisan about 6 six days to make a square meter.  However, depicting a person or animal scene used 36 colors and took 14 days per square meter.  Let alone building the villa, simply decorating the floors would have taken a few years.  In modern American homes the emphasis seems to be more on adding works of art and decorations to fill in a home as opposed to decorating the physical walls and floors of a house.

One of the most beautiful rooms, shown in a picture above, depicts many types of animals frozen around a sculpture of Orpheus.  The mural depicts the ending of the myth which is centered around weakness of the human spirit.  Most of the murals in the villa had a lesson associated with the picture.

Outside of the villa next to the grand dining hall is a vomitorium.  According to Mimo, dinners could last 8 hours and to avoid disrespecting the host, guests would eat all food presented to them.  In order to make room for all the food they would sometimes need to make themselves vomit.  This act has a very different social context in the modern day..  In ancient Rome they would vomit to avoid the shame of refusing the food someone had cooked for them.  Americans’ have a negative stigma about vomiting and consider it the ability for one to control them self.

This experience in seeing the Mural has put into perspective how much hard work each person had to contribute to construct the ancient structures still standing today.  Additionally, it was interesting the amount of times that Mimo referenced a mural being centered around advising one to keep their wits about them and maintain self control.  I feel in america many people struggle with self control and it was eerie to see the topic discussed in one thousand five hundred year old art from another nation.  On future field trips I will continue to look for artworks centered around myths offering similar advice.