Eat Art Travel: Villa Romana del Casale

Detail from the diaeta di Arione

The Villa Romana del Casale stands at the base of Mount Mangone, near the Gela River. Built in the middle of the 4th Century AD as a hunting lodge by a Roman patrician the Villa has an extensive set of Roman mosaics and some of the best preserved. These extraordinarily vivid mosaics, produced by North African artisans, deal with numerous subjects, ranging from Homeric escapades and mythological scenes to portrayals of daily life, including the famous girls exercising in their “bikinis”. The presence of skilled African mosaic workers linked to the cities of Carthage, Hippo, Caesarea, turned Villa del Casale into one of the most important testimonies of all the African mosaic art of the Late Antiquity and at the same time an example of the ability of the Roman culture to convey the strength of its state, military and economic organizations, concepts, and values throughout the Mediterranean. Flooded by sediment layers brought by a great deluge in the 12th Century, the Villa was partly excavated in the 1930s but it wasn't until the with the excavations of Paolo Orsi, Giuseppe Culrera and Gino Vinicio Gentile did the magnitude and magnificence of Villa Romana del Casale come to light.

The Villa was built in four main sections: the main entrance with its thermal baths, an open courtyard or peristylium with the living area and guest rooms, the private rooms of the owner, complete with a public hall or basilica and a dining room or triclinium with an elliptical courtyard. This tour starts with the thermae or thermal baths, continues past palaestra or gymnasium which on some maps is labeled as the salone de circo, then continues past the peristylium.

The aqueduct leading to the thermae.

The praefurnia (furnaces) for the calidaria.

The palaestra or gymnasium, the mosaics represent the games of the Circus Maximus of Rome.

The peristylium was an open courtyard within the house; the columns surrounding the garden supported a roofed portico. The following mosaics are from one of the porticos or from rooms off the peristyle.

One of the medallions on the floor of the peristyle.

The room of the small game hunt has some of the best preserved mosaics.

When one only has a spear a boar looks big to me.

The great hunting gallery is 60 meters which depicts a hunt starting from the eastern empire on the right and western on the left ending with captured animals unloaded at the port of Ostia.

In 1959-60, Gino Vinicio Gentili excavated a mosaic on the floor of the room dubbed the "Chamber of the Ten Maidens" (Sala delle Dieci Ragazze in Italian). Informally called "the bikini girls", the maidens appear in a mosaic artwork which scholars named Coronation of the Winner. The young women perform sports including weight-lifting, discus throwing, running and ball-games. A woman in a toga is depicted with a crown in her hand; one of the maidens holds a palm frond. The bikini girls represent a bit of remodeling and the older geometric patterned floor is visible in one corner of the room.