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Archaeologists working in Sicily in the 1950s must have been quite pleased when, among sweet-smelling orange groves, jasmine bushes, and bright purple bougainvilleas, they stumbled upon an extraordinary Roman villa — renamed Villa Romana del Casale — that had remained buried for centuries.
And it’s not like the villa was small, either: with a surface of a whopping 3,500 square meters (around 36,700 square feet), the building was huge and quite well-preserved. After being partially demolished during a Norman invasion, a mudslide from a nearby mountain covered the area, preventing the building from being looted or vandalized.
Dating between the III and IV century AD, to modern eyes the sprawling construction would have looked more like a luxury resort than a house: it included dozens of floor-heated rooms, a luxurious spa complex with both cold and hot pools, a gym, endless marble colonnades, enchanting fountains, and charming inner courtyards. But the most captivating features of the villa were the awe-inspiring mosaics that adorned its floors.
