and their landscape setting, while the house itself was called a palazzo.108 The word villa brings to mind variously a working farm, a simple homestead, an architecturally refined country seat, a refuge from the irritations and dangers of the city, a retreat for study and inspiration, a luxurious vacation house, a locus amoenus (place of pleasure), and a paradise on earth. As this list suggests, these overlapping associations can be thought of as occupying a scale from simple and necessary to elaborate and idealized.
The origin of the word villa is by no means clear, nor is its meaning fixed very securely by its early usage. Pliny the Elder said that in the Twelve Tables, the traditional founding documents of Roman law written in the middle of the fifth century B.C., the word villa never occurs, but that the word hortus is “always used in that sense.”109 In the later codes of law, villa signified a building in the country that, together with its ager (land), formed a fundus (estate).110 A Latin word closely related to villa is vilicus, which is both an adjective meaning “pertaining to an estate” and a noun meaning “steward,” or “overseer of an estate.” Varro’s Rerum rusticarum contains an etymology of the noun, vilicus.
Vilicus agri colendi causa constitutus atque appellatus a villa, quod ab eo in eam convehuntur fructus et evehuntur, cum veneunt. A quo rustici etiam nunc quoque viam veham appellant propter vecturuas et vellam, non villam, quo vehunt et unde vehunt.
(The vilicus is appointed for the purpose of tilling the ground, and the name is derived from villa, the place into which the crops are hauled [vehuntur], and out of which they are hauled by him when they are sold. For this reason the peasants even now call a road veha, because of the hauling; and they call the place to which and from which they haul vella and not villa.)111
Of the ancient Roman authors invoked by Taegio in La Villa to support his argument for the superiority of country life over city life, six prove to be important sources for the origin and early usage of villa: Marcus Porcius Cato, who wrote the earliest extant piece of continuous Latin prose, De agri cultura, in 165 B.C.; Marcus Tullius Cicero, who wrote De senectute in 40 B.C.; Marcus Terentius Varro, who wrote Rerum rusticarum in 37 B.C.; Lucius Iunius Moderatus Columella, who wrote the most systematic extant Roman agricultural manual, De re rustica, in 65 A.D.; Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus), who wrote Naturalis historia in A.D. 70; and his nephew Pliny the Younger (Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus), whose Epistulae were first published around A.D. 100. Another important ancient source for the meaning of villa, a source Taegio used extensively, is the Greek author Xenophon, who wrote Oeconomicus around 360 B.C.
The term villa may have been relatively new at the time Cato was writing. The villa-residence he described was a working farmhouse, complete with horse stalls and quarters for servants.112 Scholars today commonly refer to this type of building, for which archaeological evidence has been found at Boscoreale and elsewhere, as villa rustica, although Cato never used that term. His word for such a farmhouse is simply villa. Varro, whose description of a villa is more detailed than Cato’s, was the first of the ancient writers to distinguish between villa rustica and villa urbana. In Varro’s day, the villae urbanae of the wealthy were typically more elaborate architecturally than the serviceable farmhouse described by Cato, and they were often adorned with painted decoration and filled with expensive furnishings. That Varro disapproved of this trend is evident in the following passage in which he praised the thrifty ancients and condemned his extravagant contemporaries.
Itaque illorum villae rusticae erant maioris preti quam urbanae, quae nunc sunt pleracque contra…. Nunc contra villam urbanam quam maximam ac politissimam habeant dant operam ac cum Metelli ac Luculli villis pessimo publico aedificatis certant.
(And so their [the ancients’] villae rusticae cost more than their villae urbanae, while now the opposite is usually the case…. Nowadays, on the other hand, people try to have as large and handsome a villa urbana as possible; and they vie with the villas of Metellus and Lucullus, which they have built to the great damage of the state.)113
As this excerpt from book 1 of Rerum rusticarum shows, Varro used the terms villa rustica and villa urbana to refer to two different kinds of dwellings. Later in Varro’s dialogue, the difference between these kinds of dwellings is elucidated: one is a utilitarian farmhouse, the other a luxurious country residence dissociated from farming. In a long passage in book 3, in which one interlocutor asks what a villa is, a range of examples is given in reply. At one end of the spectrum is a villa that entirely lacks painted or sculpted embellishments. At the other extreme is a villa that serves no purpose related to the tilling of the soil.114 For Varro it was not a building’s location, size, or level of comfort but its economic productivity (which could be based on raising anything from crops to cattle, birds, or bees) that made it a villa.
Like Varro, Columella distinguished between rustica and urbana, but for a purpose different from Varro’s. According to Columella, the rustica (overseer’s residence), the urbana (owner’s residence), and the fructuaria (storehouse) were the three main parts of the villa, differentiated according to use: “Modus autem membroumque numerus aptetur universo consaepto et dividatur in tres partes, urbanam, rusticam, fructuariam” (Moreover, the size [of the villa] and the number of its members should be proportioned to the whole enclosure, and it should be divided into three parts: urbana, rustica, and fructuaria.)115 It is clear from the context that Columella was referring to a building that was composed of more or less loosely related parts. The same building housed, in three sections, everything that needed shelter: the owner’s family; the slave household, cattle, and other animals; and the wine and all the produce of the villa. The two principles Columella set forth that were supposed to guide the arrangement of spaces within each section were solar orientation—“balnearia occidenti aestivo advertantur” (the baths should face the setting sun of summer)—and convenience—“vilico iuxta ianuam fiat habitatio, ut intrantium exeuntiumque conspectum habeat” (quarters should be provided for the overseer alongside the entrance, so that he might have a view of all who come in and go out).116 Columella distinguished between the villa and the consaeptum (fenced enclosure) in which it is built. Even where he said that there should be “vel intra villam vel extrinsecus inductus fons perrenis” (a never-failing spring either within the villa or brought in from outside) and that “salientes rivi … perducendos in villam” (bubbling brooks … should be conducted into the villa), Columella used the word villa to refer to an articulated and functionally differentiated aedificium (building), not an estate.117
Another important ancient source of villa is the late first-century A.D. Roman author Marcus Valerius Martialis. Martial’s Epigrams contain more than thirty references to suburban villa estates, including his own. Where he referred to his own property at Nomentum, a town in Latium northeast of Rome, Martial used the words rus (farm), recessum (retreat), or hortus (garden), or he simply called it his Nomentanus.118 Distinguishing between the land and the building, he called his modest house at Nomentum both casa and rudis villa.119 He repeatedly stated that his main reason for going there was to exchange the incessant noise of the city for the quiet of the countryside, and a good night’s sleep.120 Martial praised his friend Faustinus’s villa at Baiae because it “rure vero barbaroque laetatur” (rejoices in the true, rough countryside). He contrasted Faustinus’s villa with a property “sub urbe” (near Rome) that offered its guests “famem mundam” (elegant starvation).121 Quiet was evidently more important to Martial than either distance from the city or rusticity. He said he preferred the villa of Julius Martialis on the Janiculum in Rome to larger ones at Tibur or Praeneste because there he could view the city below isolated from its noise, even though he wondered whether the “celsa villa” (lofty villa) ought to be called a rus (country place) or a domus (urban residence).122
