"Miraris cur me Laurentinum uel (si ita mauis), Laurens menum tanto opere delectet; desines mirari, cum cognoueris gratiam uillae, opportunitatem loci, litoris spatiu. [You wonder why my Laurentinum (or if you prefer, my Laurens) delights me so. You will cease to wonder when you have become acquainted with the charm of the villa itself, the convenience of the location and the spaciousness of the shore.]"
In these opening lines of a letter written to his friend Gallus around the end of the first century A.D., Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus - Pliny the Younger - proudly and lovingly praised the virtues of this seaside villa at Laurentum, on the Tyrrhenian coast southwest of Rome. Although its precise location has never been pinpointed, a recent study of Pliny's Laurentine villa by a team of architecture and classics scholars provides some interesting insights into life in a Roman villa, the villa tradition in ancient Roman society, and some implications for contemporary architecture.
Pliny the Younger was so called to distinguish him from his famous uncle, Pliny the Elder, an indefatigable scholar and writer who produced the celebrated thirty-seven-volume Natural History (characterized by one scholar as "a storehouse of ancient errors"). The younger Pliny, a successful lawyer and imperial administrator, is best known to classical scholars as the author of the nine-volume Epistularium, a collection of elegantly written letters that convey a wealth of information about social, literary, political, and domestic life in first-century Rome.
Like most wealthy Romans, Pliny owned a lot of real estate, including a country place in Tuscany as well as the villa at Laurentum. Two of his letters describe these villas, and a number of scholars have used information in the letters to "reconstruct" them. Their actual locations have never been identified, however, so the reconstructions remain speculative. Pliny's letter tells us that the Laurentine villa was not far from Ostia, a busy Roman seaport at the mouth of the Tiber through which grain and other commodities from all over the empire made their way to the imperial capital. The remains of ancient Ostia - Ostia Antica - were excavated in the late 1930s, and they reveal a great deal about daily life in Pliny's time in this important crossroads of the Roman Empire.
Ruins at a site near Ostia Antica known as Scavi di Laurentum were thought for many years to be the remains of Pliny's villa, but careful investigation has proved that many features of these ruins do not correspond to Pliny's descriptions. Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti, and Italian scholar of classical architecture, has investigated another site not far from Ostia Antica known as Grotta di Piastra. She is convinced that it is the location of the Laurentine villa, but her findings have not won widespread acceptance in the archaeological community.
The Villa Tradition
Noble Romans maintained villas as rural retreats from the pressures and distractions of public life in the city, but the villa was not just a luxurious vacation home. It was part of the tradition of Roman noblesse - the presumption was that it helped its patrician owner serve society better by providing a fresh perspective on life through periodic communion with the natural world of the
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