History
The Villa Romana del Casale and its mosaics
In a wooded valley in the middle of Sicily lies a Roman country house whose floors are carpeted with mosaics: hunters, wild beasts, chariot races and ten young women in what look very like bikinis. A landslide buried it, and that is why they survived.
By Walter Pellow2 November 20264 min read
Most Roman villas are a matter of foundations and imagination. The Villa Romana del Casale is something else: a great country house of the fourth century AD whose floors survive almost entire, about 3,500 square metres of mosaic spread through dozens of rooms, corridors and courtyards. Walk the raised walkways above them and you look down on the private world of a very rich Roman: his hunting, his entertainments, his gods and his taste in decoration, all laid out in coloured stone.
The villa lies in a quiet valley a few kilometres outside the hill town of Piazza Armerina, in the middle of Sicily. In the twelfth century a landslide came down the slope above and buried much of it in mud, and it stayed buried for most of the following eight hundred years. That was its salvation. Sheltered from the weather and from builders in search of stone, the mosaics kept their colours, and when archaeologists cleared the site properly in the mid-twentieth century they found them largely intact. The villa has been a World Heritage Site since 1997.
Who lived here
Nobody knows for certain. The house was built, or rebuilt on a grand scale, in the early fourth century, and it was a statement of enormous wealth: a sequence of reception rooms, baths, courtyards and apartments, decorated by workshops that probably came from North Africa, where mosaic was a great industry of the age. Some scholars have suggested it belonged to a member of the imperial family; others to a senator with great estates in Sicily. What is clear is that its owner was rich, cultivated and fond of the hunt.
In the twelfth century a landslide buried much of the villa in mud. That was its salvation.
The Great Hunt and the ten young women
The most famous floor is the Great Hunt, a long corridor running across the house whose mosaic shows the capture of wild animals for the games in Rome. Hunters with spears and shields wrestle leopards, antelopes and wild boar into crates; animals are driven up gangplanks onto ships; a tiger, an ostrich and a rhinoceros appear among the scenes. At each end of the corridor is a personification of a distant land: Africa, perhaps, and India or Arabia. It is the supply chain of the Colosseum, set in stone for a man who may have been part of it.
Then there is the room everyone asks about. In one small chamber, ten young women are shown exercising in what look exactly like modern bikinis: running, throwing a discus, lifting weights, playing with a ball, and one of them being crowned as the winner with a palm. They are usually called the bikini girls, and they are as much a surprise now as they must have been to the first excavators.
There is much more. The Little Hunt shows a hunting party at a picnic under an awning. A chariot race fills the floor of the baths. In another room, the cyclops Polyphemus is offered wine by Odysseus; elsewhere, cupids fish from boats, and in the dining hall Hercules performs his labours. The walkways lead you round in a long loop, and it takes a couple of hours to do justice to it.
Tours that go there
Many tours of Sicily stop at the villa on their way across the middle of the island.
Explore's fourteen-night Sicily in Depth with Historian Antonio Marretta, led by a historian, has the most time for it: its places include Syracuse and Ortygia, Noto and Ragusa, Piazza Armerina and the Villa Romana, the Greek city of Morgantina and the hill town of Enna, then Agrigento, the Stair of the Turks, Selinunte and Marsala. It departs in April, May, June, September and October.
Explore's seven-night Classical Sicily takes in Syracuse and Ortygia, Piazza Armerina and the Villa Romana del Casale, Agrigento, Trapani, Erice, Palermo, Monreale, Cefalù, Giardini Naxos and Mount Etna. Its departure months are March, April, May, June, August, September, October and November.
Travelsphere's seven-night The Best of Sicily includes Catania, Mount Etna, Taormina, the Villa Romana del Casale, Campofelice di Roccella, Agrigento, Palermo, Monreale and Cefalù.
Go early in the day if you can, before the groups and the heat, and take your time over the Great Hunt. It repays a slow walk from one end to the other.
By Walter Pellow, the name Atlas & Passage’s editorial team writes under. Prices and dates in the trips below come from the operators and can change.
