Laurentinum: Villa Rustica

While references to villas abound in Latin literature (e.g., Cicero, Sallust, Horace, Tacitus), Pliny the Younger's letters about his Laurentine and Tuscan villas provide the only detailed descriptions of a villa rustica belonging to a wealthy 1st Century CE Roman.

In her monograph The Villas of Pliny the Younger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924), Helen H. Tanzer writes: "The two villas are very unlike: the Laurentine was a long low house, situated in a low flat country; the Tuscan was on the slope of a hill near very high mountains" (p. 47). Her study notes that Epistle II.17 (Latin; English) furnished sufficiently concrete information for scholars and students to construct hundreds of reconstruction plans and drawings for these villas, beginning with Vincenzo Scamozzi (1615), an Italian architect.

Tanzer drew up a list of the details Pliny's letter provides about Laurentinum which she then used to test the accuracy of each of the 22 reconstructions she examined (see p. 44). She rates Haudebourt's conception (1838) highly for being "both pleasing and accurate" (p. 72) and Bouchet's derivation (1852) for being "a charming study" (p. 81).

In conclusion, she offers the following plan (p. 106), based closely on Pliny's text (compare the plan to Tanzer's list by clicking on Key)

Ann Raia, The College of New Rochelle
araia@cnr.edu