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Pliny the Younger's Laurentinum

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

The discovery of the Laurentinum in the Castel Porziano Estate

The Laurentimu of Pliny the Younger


Pliny the younger was a nice and very interesting ancient Roman writer. He didn’t leave important treatises as the ones which his uncle has left us, but his letters remain a very significant source of news about the times of his life. Among them, very important are the ones where he depicts his two villas: the Tuscany one and the Laurentinum and, for this one, while asking a friend to come there for a visit, he describes all the building room by room. It is just this letter which interested - and still interests - many scholars. Even Pirro Ligorio must have planned to do its reconstruction. At least among some of his manuscripts we discovered a list of the rooms recorded in Pliny’s letter, but nothing else was found.
However during the centuries many other scholars drew plants of the Laurentinum, or at least how they imagined its plant must have been. After this a book collecting all these works has been done. The many reconstructions in it belong to different centuries, and each one is influenced by the prevalent fashions of its time. Thus in this book we see the enormous and symmetrical palaces proper to the architectonic ideas of the XVII cent. and, nearby, the simpler and linear modern ones. Among all of them the last and the most amusing one has been made by a French architect, Krier. Krier, basing himself on a peculiar vision of the Laurentinum and of the Latium coast too, decided that Pliny’s villa must have been built on a high, precipitous and rocky peninsula. Apparently he ignored the fact that it would have been very difficult for anyone to find a flatter area than the one on which this retreat stood. However, taking this in no account. he imagined the residence as a pharaonic collection of pavilions, terraces, halls and gardens covering the flanks of a high and rocky promontory, the kind of promontory, just to explain, one could find at Capri and a residence like Tiberius’ Villa Iovis, only larger, and this notwithstanding the fact that in his description poor Pliny always insisted that his Laurentinum was small: “a comfortable villa but easy to manage” he said. Of course for us 2006 people it would have seemed grand, but for a Roman of Pliny times his residence must have seemed the minimum that any patrician would have considered apt for him to live in.
As many other scholars, also the author of this article studied Pliny letter and tried her hand to a modest reconstruction. What happened was that one of the best archaeologist of our time, Antonio Maria Colini, who at Castel Fusano had excavated a so-called Pliny Villa, but had some doubt on what it really was, learning of the existence of this research, asked the author of it if she would accept to confront her plant with the Castel Fusano’s excavations map. This was made and after studying it both scholars reached the conclusion that the so called Castel Fusano Pliny’s villa could never had been the Laurentinum. They couldn’t even accept the hypothesis advanced by other scholars who proposed that the evident differences between the description of the Laurentinum and the villa excavated by Prof. Colini could be the results of modifications done to the building during the centuries. The opposition to this theory was based to the fact that in his excavations prof Colini had only found walls datable to two centuries before Pliny’s times; ergo the ancient and original building’s frame was still there and it had nothing to do with the Roman writer description of his Laurentinum. The only way to transform it in the Plinian maritime villa would have been to destroy everything, excavate in the ground an enormous hole and rebuild it anew, but in this case there would have been only II cent. A.D walls.
Of course at this moment one felt obliged to find the real Laurentinum, and the author of the reconstruction decided that the best hope to succeed would be to follow word for word what was written in the letter to Gallo, the friend whom Pliny was inviting to spend some time with him.
In this letter the writer told his friend that he could come there taking two different roads, the Ostiense and the Laurentina. Pliny explained that one could come by coach but as, at a certain moment one had to leave the road and make the last miles by sandy tracks, it was better to come on horseback. Subsequently the writer told also the exact places where his friend had to abandon the Ostiense - if he had decided to go by that road - or the Laurentina - if he had opted for the other - and at last he specified how many miles the Laurentinum stood from Rome (this also imply the fact that the distance was the same by the two roads and that they were equivalent). He also added that the villa was the second one coming from a village.
Unluckily the only thing that Pliny didn’t say was on which side of the village the villa was. Time passed and the village had been found, then Prof Colini had excavated the second villa from it going toward Ostia, and that, as we now have seen, was not the Laurentinum. To me, at this moment, the question looked simple: as the second villa from the village going toward Ostia was not the Laurentinum the Laurentinum must be the second villa from it but going in the opposite direction, that is toward Antium.
However, as some people still doubted the fact and insisted on Castel Fusano’s one as Pliny’ villa, the author of this article decided to prove it in an indisputable way. As we have just finished to say, Pliny had just told his friend that if he came by the Ostiense he had to leave it at the 11 mile and take the sandy track going in a south western direction, while if he came by the Laurentina he had to leave it at the 14 mile taking another sandy track going toward north-west. Moreover Pliny said that by both roads the distance from the Forum was 17 miles.
Now for an architect, as the author of this research was, the two places where one had to leave the roads could be taken as two triangulation’s spot. At this moment the only thing one had to do was to take a scribing compass, fix its needle on one of this two triangulation points and open it to tracing an arc equivalent to the miles lacking to the site (3 miles coming from the Laurentina and 6 miles from the Ostiense): the Laurentinum would be where the two arcs crossed each other.
This was done and the two arcs crossed just on the ruins of the so called Villa Magna, the second one from the village going toward Antium. The moment had come to inform the archaeological world of what had been found, and in 1983 this I did by a lecture given at the Lincei Academy.
Then Prof. Colini asked for me the permits to complete my research in the presidential estate of Castel Porziano and I began to survey what was left of this building. Reading and rereading so many times Pliny’s letter I knew it as if it had been mine. I even saw it as Pliny had described his Laurentinum, clear and bright, full of cheerfulness, with the waves breaking at its feet; I saw its terraces, the tower with a third floor triclinium overlooking the Tyrrenian sea where, in the late afternoon, one could dine while in the luminosity of the setting sun the sails of the boats speeding toward Ostia’ were swelled by the wind. At its feet, just following the coastline, lay one of the most important feature of the Laurentinum: the long cryptoporcticus which had many large windows looking on the Tyrrenian sea, and a beautiful terrace perfumed by “violets” running on its front, the terrace where at morning one could stroll protected from the rays of the rising sun, while in the afternoon it was better to promenade oneself under the green vine-leaves of the garden pergola.
Of course to see all this beautiful and peaceful retreat reduced to ruins was heartbreaking. Now among the bushes and the brambles she saw the heaps of rubble, the collapsed walls, the big holes opened in the soil through which one could see the destruction brought by the waves when, bursting in the building’s foundations, they made all the Laurentinum’s front explode. That these ruins were what once had been Pliny’s villa was highly probable, but it was necessary now to prove it beyond all doubts. Thus she began to survey what was left and made a plant of all the surfacing ruins spending her time among vipers, boars and, what was even worse, clouds of horse-flies, studying the sites and, over all, controlling if the bearings she did find there coincided with what was written in Pliny’s letter.
One thing that among all these ruins attracted more than anything else her attention, was a long and narrow dell whose position coincided of the cryptoporticus’ one. The point was to check if this element was the Laurentinum’s walled porch or if it was only a space delimited by heap of ruins. At this point a trench cutting the small valley from the garden, whose emplacement was clear to see, toward the sea was mandatory. We all knew that if at the end of this probe we would have found the large windows described by Pliny the question would have been closed. As after the Lincei lecture the Ostia’s Superintendence had set two workmen at her disposition she started the work: It took all the day but when at last the window-sill of the first window appeared, it was sheer triumph: the ruins disappeared and to the eyes of one that had so much loved the Laurentinum everything was again new, she could again see it clear, bright, and full of cheerfulness, with the waves breaking at the building’s feet, waves which were nearly a km from the ancient coast-line, but she was looking at them through the now discovered window, just there on the other side of the terrace perfume by violets.

Bibliography
1. E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI – La villa laurentina di Plinio il Giovane: un’ennesima ricostruzione in Lunario romano 1983, Rome, December 1982, pp. 229-251.
2. E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, La c.d. Villa Magna: il Laurentinum di Plinio il Giovane in Atti Acc. Naz. dei Lincei, Anno CCCLXXXI, 1984, Serie ottava, Vol. XXXIX, fasc. 7-12 (July-December 1984),pp.339-358.
3. E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, La Villa Magna a Grotte di Piastra in Castelporziano I, Iª Campagna di scavo e di restauro 1984, in Castelporziano 1, Rome 1985, pp. 53-66.

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