Sunday, May 14
If you’re a really rich Roman guy, you can have a huge villa with two master suites. Then you cover all the floors with intricate mosaics like this. This is one little section of a huge corridor separating the two parts of the villa. This illustrates how he got his wealth—collecting exotic animals for show or combat. This villa is in the middle of nowhere, presumably centrally located for trade routes. The benefit for history is that the whole place was buried in a landslide and nobody bothered to find it, so it’s remarkably well-preserved.
We enjoyed seeing the great number and variety of mosaics—stories from mythology, children, animals, and the female athletes known as the “bikini girls.”
Next we went to the beautiful farm of a baroness, who welcomed us in and fed us a lovely lunch. On the way out we drove by the ancient hilltop city of Piazza Armerina.