Valdonega Roman Villa

Description

The luxurious suburban villa, located outside the urban layout of Roman Verona, followed the slope of the landscape and therefore was probably divided into several pavilions placed on many levels, allowing a panoramic view of the city. Of the original villa only three rooms, overlooking a large porch, were found during the excavations that began in 1957, the rest of the original structure is located below modern buildings. The L-shaped porch was probably open to the courtyard or garden of the house, the large windows of the house run along it, while the columns, of which only the bases remain, are placed at irregular distances from each other, to allow the light entrance into the rooms. At the northern end of the porch there are steps that led to rooms located at higher altitudes.

The main room is a large rectangular chamber intended for a triclinium, that is, the space in which the owner ate with the guests on three beds placed close to the colonnade. This environment is agreed to be a corinthian oecus, a particular type of triclinium that can be found in examples of similar structure and decoration in the domus of Rome and Pompeii. This room had a colonnade on three sides and, on the only side without columns, a door flanked by two windows opened to the South. The columns are made of pink stone with figurative capitals, of which one has been found, decorated with dolphins and dated to the first half of the 1st century. The central part of the room had to be covered by a vault made of woven canes and fixed to the roof above by means of wooden tie rods, while the space between the columns and the perimeter walls was characterized by a flat roof. The room is paved with a mosaic, with black tiles along the perimeter and white in the center, while the spaces between the columns are paved with mosaic panels characterized by polychrome decorations of leaves and birds, and bichrome decorations with various plant figures. On the walls was a fresco depicting a garden. …