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The Little Circus Villa

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

VILLA OF THE LITTLE CIRCUS
The second villa was the nearby one that I called the Little Circus. It rose on a high promontory two kilometers to the East of the Maritime Odeon overlooking the long, sandy and arched beaches set at its both sides. This once imposing residence had a 300 m front on the sea At the rear of the building, an area free of masonry was probably occupied by ornamental bushes and trees while in the eastern part of the villa, a square peristyle, with the remains of a basin necessary for irrigation, was certainly a garden and so must have been also the nearby central courtyard.
However the most interesting garden of this villa was located on the extreme western and higher part of the promontory. Here a long, narrow enclosure shaped like a circus, occupied an area 85 m long and 15 m wide. Two walls enclosed its length. In its center we can still see the remains of a flowerbed, 60 m long and 6 m wide, shaped like a circus’ spina. Two semicircular basins of water, set at each end, stood in the places which, in a real circus, would have been occupied by the metae. A square basin divided the flowerbed in two unequal parts. Viewed from a tower triclinium which stood at the western end, this created the illusion of a much longer garden than the one that the space on the top of the cliff would permit. Gardens shaped like circus, stadia or a hippodromes came to fashion around the end of the I cent. A.D. Other gardens of this type existed in the Roman Empire. The list includes the hippodrome of Pliny the Younger's Tuscany villa; the Stadium in Domitian's Domus Flavia on the Palatine hill; the one in this emperor's country residence of villa Albana and the so-called Stadium of Hadrian's Villa Adriana.
The Little Circus villa had of course its own baths set at the eastern end of the circus shaped garden. In one of its room, maybe a frigidarium, because in all the others heated parts there was no more flooring left, there still were mosaics of later times III or even Iv cent. A.D.) but in good conditions.
However after having crossed all the villa with all its courtyard and rooms, was buried in the soil but here there was still much to excavate, I saw an arch just emerging from the soil, and I know that here one could discover many and more beautiful mosaics.