Villa Romana del Casale: The Roman Mosaics of Sicily

The Villa Romana del Casale lies in a quiet wooded valley a few kilometres outside Piazza Armerina, in the hill country of central Sicily. Built in the early fourth century AD over an older farmhouse, it was the centre of a great agricultural estate, and almost every one of its rooms was floored with mosaic: about 3,500 square metres in all, laid by craftsmen working in the North African manner. UNESCO inscribed the villa on the World Heritage List in 1997 and calls its floors the finest mosaics in situ anywhere in the Roman world. Both the 25-day Mediterranean Islands of Malta, Sicily, Sardinia & Corsica tour and the 12-day Malta & Sicily small group tour spend part of Day 8 here, with a guided visit on the way from Syracuse to Agrigento.

Who built the Villa Romana del Casale?

Nobody knows for certain, and the question has been argued over for seventy years. The present building dates from the first half of the fourth century AD; most scholars place its main phase in the early decades of that century, and it was enlarged again after an earthquake in the 360s. Beneath it lie the remains of a more modest villa that had stood on the site since roughly the first century.

When the great floors were uncovered in the 1950s, their scale and their imagery suggested an emperor. The favourite candidate was Maximian, who ruled the western half of the empire alongside Diocletian from 286 to 305 and styled himself Herculius, after the hero. The villa’s triclinium is devoted to the Labours of Hercules, and one richly dressed figure in the great hunting mosaic, flanked by guards with shields, has been read as a portrait of him. The difficulty is that none of this proves imperial ownership. Hercules, hunting scenes and military insignia were part of the shared visual language of the late Roman elite, and no inscription names the owner.

The view now generally accepted, and the one taken by the regional archaeological park that manages the site, is that the dominus was a senator of the highest rank, quite possibly a prefect of the city of Rome, who owned vast estates in Sicily. Names proposed include Lucius Aradius Valerius Proculus Populonius, governor of Sicily in the 320s and consul in 340, and members of the Ceionii Rufii family, who held the urban prefecture. Sicilian grain fed Rome in this period, and a man with land here could become very rich indeed. The villa was his country seat and estate office as much as his pleasure house: storerooms for grain, oil and wine stood near the entrance.

Buried, forgotten and rediscovered

The villa’s survival owes a good deal to misfortune. In the fifth and sixth centuries its outer walls were thickened for defence, and in the following centuries parts of it were reused, while a sizeable village grew up around it under Arab and then Norman rule. That settlement, known to the twelfth-century geographer al-Idrisi, was destroyed in 1161 during the reign of the Norman king William I, and in 1163 a new fortified town, the forerunner of today’s Piazza Armerina, was founded on the hill nearby. Around the same time a flood of mud and debris from the slopes above, described in some accounts as a landslide, buried the ruins. The deposit sealed the floors, sparing them both the plough and the stone robbers who stripped so many Roman sites.

The site’s name comes from a small group of houses, the casale, that stood here in the fifteenth century. Fragments of mosaic and columns turned up in the nineteenth century, the first systematic digs came in 1929 and in the late 1930s, and between 1950 and 1960 the archaeologist Gino Vinicio Gentili uncovered the great complex that visitors see today. Excavation continues: since 2004 Rome’s Sapienza University has been exploring the medieval village and the villa’s outlying buildings, including a second bath house near the entrance.

Can you walk on the mosaics?

No: you see the floors from raised walkways, never by walking on them. After Gentili’s excavations the architect Franco Minissi designed a cover of metal frames with clear plastic and glass panels, which allowed visitors to look down from catwalks while the outlines of the cover suggested the shape of the ancient rooms. With too little maintenance it trapped heat and let in water, and the mosaics suffered.

From 2007 a large restoration replaced Minissi’s structure with solid roofs on timber beams and plastered walls, and conservators cleaned and consolidated the floors and the surviving wall paintings. The work was completed in 2012. Not everyone admires the new buildings, which from outside look rather like farm sheds, but the interiors are cooler and drier, and the elevated walkways were kept, so you still look down into each room from the tops of the walls, much as the owner’s guests would have seen the floors from the doorways.

The rooms not to miss

The villa spreads over several terraces at the foot of a hill, and the usual route leads from the monumental entrance through the baths, around the great peristyle and along the hunting corridor to the reception hall and private apartments, then back past the dining hall and an oval courtyard. A guided visit picks out the following.

The Corridor of the Great Hunt

The villa’s showpiece is a corridor some 60 metres long, closing the east side of the peristyle, with an apse at each end. Its floor is one continuous scene: the capture of wild animals across the empire and their shipment to Rome for the games of the amphitheatre. Hunters with spears and shields drive leopards, antelope and boar into traps; a horseman gallops off with a tiger cub; an elephant is led up a gangplank onto a merchant ship; and a wounded lioness turns on a hunter. Female figures in the apses personify the distant lands the animals came from.

The Small Hunt

Off the north portico of the peristyle, the Room of the Small Hunt shows a day in the field on the owner’s own estate, perhaps nearer the life he knew. In five bands, the party sets out with dogs, chases a fox and a hare, drives deer into a net and brings home a captured boar; an offering is made to Diana, and at the centre the hunters feast in the open air on a curved banqueting couch.

The Room of the Ten Maidens

The villa’s most photographed floor is in a fairly small room. Ten young women in two-piece athletic dress compete at running, the discus, a weighted long jump and ball games, and a victor receives a crown and a palm. They are often called the “bikini girls”, but the garments are sportswear rather than swimwear: a breast band and a loincloth. Look at one corner, where an older geometric floor shows through: the athletes were laid over it during a later redecoration.

Arion and the sea

In a large apsed hall, probably used for dining, the floor becomes a sea. The legendary singer Arion, rescued by a dolphin that had been charmed by his music, rides at the centre with his lyre, surrounded by tritons, sea nymphs, sea horses, fish and cherubs in a procession that fills the room.

Ulysses and the Cyclops

In the antechamber of one of the private apartments, a smaller but famous floor illustrates Book IX of the Odyssey. Ulysses offers a bowl of wine to the giant Polyphemus, seated in his cave among his flock with a gutted ram across his knees. It is the moment before the trick that lets the Greeks blind the Cyclops and escape. Look closely at the giant’s face: the mosaicist gave him three eyes.

The triclinium and the Labours of Hercules

The grand dining hall, with three great apses, shows the Labours of Hercules in an unusual way. Hercules himself never appears on the main floor, about half of which is lost; instead it is crowded with the creatures he overcame, among them the Nemean lion, the Hydra, the Cretan bull and the man-eating mares of Diomedes, sprawled in dramatic twisted poses. The apses carry the hero’s apotheosis, the defeat of the Giants and the myth of Lycurgus. This is the room that fed the Maximian theory, and it is one of the most accomplished in the villa.

The baths

The baths, on the lower ground to the west, are where many visits begin. The plan of a full Roman bath suite survives, with an octagonal cold room, warm rooms and hot rooms whose raised floors show the hypocaust system that carried heat from the furnaces. A long exercise hall nearby has a mosaic of a chariot race in the Circus Maximus, with the central barrier and turning posts of the Roman racecourse clearly drawn.

How long do you need at the Villa Romana del Casale?

Allow about two hours to follow the walkways around the whole villa without hurrying. That gives time for the Great Hunt, the private apartments and the triclinium, which are the parts most visitors want to linger over.

Is the visit difficult on foot?

The visit is mostly a gentle walk, but it involves a series of steps up and down between the terraces and onto the walkways. The walkways are firm and have handrails, and most of the route is under cover, which helps in summer heat and winter rain. Outside, between the car park, the entrance and the buildings, the paths are gravel and packed earth with some slopes. Comfortable shoes with good grip are enough.

Where is the villa, and when is it open?

The villa lies a few kilometres south-west of Piazza Armerina, in the province of Enna, on the inland route between Syracuse and Agrigento. It is run by the Sicilian Region’s Parco archeologico di Morgantina e della Villa romana del Casale, and at the time of writing the park lists the villa as open every day from 9am to 7pm, with the ticket office closing an hour earlier, and other official listings give shorter winter hours. Times change with the season and for special events, so check the park’s website before you go.

Caltagirone and its ceramic staircase

The 12-day tour stops on the morning of Day 8 at Caltagirone, a hill town about 30 kilometres by road south-east of Piazza Armerina that has made pottery for centuries. Rebuilt after the earthquake of 1693, it is one of the eight Baroque towns of the Val di Noto inscribed together by UNESCO in 2002. Its emblem is the Scala di Santa Maria del Monte, a staircase of 142 steps laid out in the early seventeenth century to link the lower town with the church of Santa Maria del Monte at the top. In the mid-1950s the risers were faced with hand-painted majolica tiles, each flight following a different period of Sicilian ceramics, from Arab-influenced patterns to Baroque designs. On the evenings of 24 and 25 July the staircase is lit with thousands of small lamps for the feast of Saint James, the town’s patron.

The Villa Romana del Casale on Day 8 of the tours

On both tours, Day 8 is the drive from Syracuse across the interior to Agrigento, with a guided visit to the Villa Romana del Casale at Piazza Armerina. On the 12-day Malta & Sicily – Mediterranean Islands small group tour, the group first stops in Caltagirone to see the staircase, then has free time for lunch before continuing to the villa. On the 25-day tour the group travels directly to the villa. Both end the day at the hotel in Agrigento, with the evening free; our introduction to Agrigento, the hill town above the temples, sets the scene.

The next morning both tours visit the Greek temples in Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples, then stop at Segesta on the way to Trapani, on Sicily’s western tip. The day before the villa is spent in Syracuse and Ortigia, so in three days you move from Greek Sicily to Roman Sicily and back again. For the shape of the whole journey, see our Mediterranean islands itinerary from Malta to Corsica and our suggested route around Sicily.

Both tours are rated Level 3, Moderate to Challenging, with up to six hours of activity a day over varied terrain, and an Odyssey Program Leader travels with the group alongside local guides. The Villa Romana del Casale is one of the few places where you can see how the richest Romans of the late empire lived at home, and the floors they walked on are still where they laid them. To see them in a small group of up to 16 travellers, look at the Mediterranean Islands of Malta, Sicily, Sardinia & Corsica or the shorter Malta and Sicily tour.