Roman villa

A Roman villa was typically a farmhouse or country house in the territory of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, sometimes reaching extravagant proportions.

Nevertheless, the term "Roman villa" generally covers buildings with the common features of being extra-urban (i.e. located outside urban settlements, unlike the domus which was inside them) and residential, with accommodation for the owner. The definition also changed with time: the earliest examples are mostly humble farmhouses in Italy, while from the Republican period a range of larger building types are included.

The present meaning of "villa" is partially based on the fairly numerous ancient Roman written sources and on archaeological remains, though many of these are poorly preserved.

The most detailed ancient text on the meaning of "villa" is by Varro (116–27 BC) dating from the end of the Republican period, which is used for most modern considerations. But Roman authors (e.g. Columella [4-70 AD], Cato the Elder [234-149 BC]) wrote in different times, with different objectives and for aristocratic readers and hence had specific interpretations of villa.

The Romans built many kinds of villas and any country house with some decorative features in the Roman style may be called a "villa" by modern scholars.

Three kinds of villas were generally described:

Other examples of villae urbanae were the middle and late Republican villas that encroached on the Campus Martius, at that time on the edge of Rome, the one at Rome's Parco della Musica or at Grottarossa in Rome, and those outside the city walls of Pompeii which demonstrate the antiquity and heritage of the villa urbana in Central Italy.

Other type of villa was a large commercial estate called latifundium which produced and exported agricultural produce; such villas might lack luxuries (e.g. Cato) but many were very sumptuous (e.g. Varro).