A Roman emperor transformed the vineyard of a luxurious villa into a place of bacchic delights

There is something new under the extraordinary estate of the Quintili villa. Extended a stone's throw from Rome, along the Via Appia, the ancient 25-hectare property once lined up all the amenities of a comfortable miniature city: sumptuous buildings, heated baths, monumental aqueduct and even a hippodrome. A vineyard and a wine-growing site naturally completed this complex of unheard-of luxury which, in the second century of our era, had stirred up the jealousy of the emperors. Such a rustic workshop could not, however, suit such a place. The masters of the place have thus carefully arranged these places of wine production in a curious way: by transforming the work of the workers into a spectacle.

The device is described in a study published in April in the scientific journal Antiquity and signed by British and Italian archaeologists. The researchers reviewed the data from the excavation operations carried out at the Villa of the Quintili under the direction of the British School at Rome. The spaces excavated in 2017 and 2018 revealed a wine production workshop, with a crushing space, two presses, a tank intended to receive the must as well as storage jars. Or all the usual structures for the metamorphosis of freshly picked grapes into nectar from the finest tables. A few oddities, however, completed the architecture of these workshops.

The details are amazing. This workspace was paved with red Breccia marble – a stunning luxury for a workshop with an ordinary cement floor. This slippery coquetry was to complicate the work of the workers. The archaeologists also noticed that the two presses, of imposing size, were fitted out in perfect symmetry, like a theater set. Even better, the must from the vats sprang into three niches clad in white marble and flanked by two decorative fountains, like a small wine and water nymphaeum. Finally, several banquet rooms surrounded the workshops and offered a bird's eye view of all the site's activities. These peripheral rooms were decorated with walls and floors in sectile opus, a pavement of unbridled luxury composed of a variety of colorful marbles, slate, serpentine and porphyry.

“All this shows that whoever built these buildings favored extravagance over any practical consideration,” sums up archaeologist Emlyn Dodd, deputy director of the British School at Rome and co-signer of the study, to the British daily. The Guardian, alongside Giuliana Galli and Riccardo Frontoni. But why such a deluge of elegance for a site that normally constitutes a menial, even invisible part of Roman villas? Why dramatize this workplace and corrupt it instead of delights? According to the specialist, the explanation would be found in the tastes of the owner of the place, in the middle of the 3rd century: Emperor Gordian III.

Owned by the Quintili family since Republican times, the villa was violently seized by Emperor Commodus in 182-183, who undertook to further embellish the splendor of the estate. The wine sector, in particular, has been dated by several clues to the reign of Gordian III, between 238 and 244, one of the most stable reigning mid-3rd century Roman emperors. "This luxury vineyard was designed so that the emperor could indulge in his bacchic pleasures", notes Emlyn Dodd. The most difficult years of the "crisis of the third century" were thus to pass less painfully for the imperial court in this place where the spectacle of winemaking was enjoyed from a generous table. Along with the site of Villa Magna, near Anagni, in Lazio, the Villa of the Quintilis constitutes the second and most brilliant example of an imperial vineyard of monstrous refinement.

The signatories of the study believe that the Villa of the Quintili makes it possible to reassess the contributions of the Roman emperors of the middle of the 3rd century to architecture. "Archaeological and epigraphic research is in the process of reassessing the reign of the Gordians", notes the study published in Antiquity, which proposes to include the metamorphoses of the wine-growing unit of the villa of the Quintili in the brief but intense great works of Gordian. III. This had focused "in particular the construction and restoration of infrastructure and performance buildings such as the Colosseum, the baths and the fountains", continue the researchers. A blurring of the classic division of villas into residential parts and laborious parts also seems to have taken place. Archeology does not say, however, whether Gordian III trod his grapes himself, shoulder to shoulder with his slaves.