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Silin's villas

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

SILIN (LEPTIS MAGNA) LIBYA
The villas of Silin are part of a group of seaside residences built on the coast by the rich ship owners of Leptis Magna. At the beginning of the second cent. A.D., the Roman rulers, trying to make a better harbor, succeeded only in silting it up. Thus the Leptitans were forced to abandon their town and look around the coast to find better mooring sites. As the Phoenicians always did, they were looking for places where their boats could stay alee from the winds and as the coast was endowed by high and rocky promontories with at both their sides “marse”, (arab word for sandy beaches) here was the ideal site to set there their maritime commerces. The sea was low but also fully charged their flat and large “oneraria” ships would never draw more than one or, at the most, for the larger boats a meter and half.
I knew all that very well because those ships - some of which are now exhibited in a Museum near Fiumicino airport - were very similar (even smaller) to the big “muciare” of a “tonnara” and, as did all the owners of tonnare, we always used those “marse”. There, during the fishing campaigns, the “muciare” could get to the shore and discharge the tunas. Moreover in winter time they were easily hauled on the beach and put in surety. And that was exactly what the Leptitans ship owners did with their fleet.
Having abandoned Leptis the wealthy owners of landed property that were set near the coast found that those were just what they needed and there they created their own mooring places dominated by the luxurious villas erected on high promontories. For fifteen miles on both sides of Leptis Magna every “marsa” (as sandy beaches are called in Lybia) had its landing place, and each promontory its villa. Goodchild, one of the best English topograph, set them on his map of Leptis area and I studied two of these residences naming them Silin's villas.
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.
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.