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The Maritime Odeon Villa

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

1 – VILLA OF THE MARITIME ODEON
The first one was the villa of the Maritime Odeon which I surveyed and of which I drew a map. It was an ample and luxurious residence with a large area at its rear where there was no evident trace of masonry. Here was probably grown the residence's traditional garden. As a matter of fact, everywhere near the seacoasts, gardens were placed at the back of the buildings to protect them from salt-laden winds. When the villa of the Maritime Odeon was active, this area must have been a green refreshing place shaded by olive trees, vines and date palms. Maybe there were also some North-African flowering bushes. However the most striking open-air feature of this villa was the arrangement of its sea front where no vegetation would ever have survived. There was what we can very well call a stone-garden, an original landscaping planned for open-air life and leisurely strolls. Here a small theatre cut in the sandstone and flanked by two long flights of steps looked out toward a mass of rock - today much eroded - which formed a dramatic background against the blue Mediterranean Sea. A porch and a cryptoporticus behind it ran along the front of the house. They offered to the villa's owners a place to exercise in the portico exposed to the fresh northern winds, or to walk sheltered from the heat in the dusky gallery enclosed by walls which, shaded by the portico in front of it, were never touched by the flaming rays of the African sun.
Air conditioning was here practiced in a very interesting and useful ancient way, a system that we find in all these buildings, but is more evident in the Odeon Maritime villa, because, when the prevalent custom in the area was to build the residences directly on the brim of the quarries necessary for the stone, a practice that caused their facades to ruin in the sea, the Odeon Maritime villa didn’t have a quarry on the promontory’s and its front remained intact.
Obviously, as always in ancient times, to try to have the best temperature in the different rooms everything was based on the orientation, and as those residences had the luck not only to have their front toward north, but also to have there the most spectacular vista there was no reason to complain. It was also evident that to protect themselves from the strong heat of this country one of the most important thing was to protect the walls of the bedrooms and of the living rooms from the ray of the sun, and it was just for this reason that all those villas had a portico on their facades and, just aside it, a cryptoporch with its windows open to the fresh sea breeze. Another cryptoporch without windows ran on the back of the residence. Also this protected the owners rooms from the outside heat. It did not have any window in its southern walla, but it was not however left without light or ventilation, because it went over their roof and opened its windows in the northern facade. Thus not only it protected their walls but kept fresh all their ceilings.
It is evident that this villa had its own baths the ruins of which can be seen on the extreme south eastern part of the promontory. All the rest of the edifice that stood between the baths and the front of the villa has been canceled by an uadi that, as torrents do, in one of his periodical ruinous flows, dragged everything in the sea.