Leptis Magna on Gardens of the Roman Empire

Silin, villa of the Maritime Odeon

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dates

unspecified

Excavation Dates

late 1960s to early 1970s

Garden Description

The villa of the Maritime Odeon was surveyed and mapped by Salza Prina Ricotti in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is an ample and luxurious residence with a large area (Fig. 1, A) at its rear where there is no evident trace of masonry. It was probably 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 local trees and ornamental plants, like date palms, olive trees and 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 theater [B] 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.

Bibliography

Ricotti, E. S. P. 1970-1971. "Le ville marittime di Silin (Leptis Magna)," Atti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia. Rendiconti 43: 135-163. (worldcat)
Ricotti, E. S. P. 1972-1973. "I porti della zona di Leptis Magna," Atti della Pontificia Accademia Romana diArcheologia. Rendiconti 45: 75-103. (worldcat)

Keywords

Villa of the Little Circus

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dates

unspecified

Excavation Dates

early 1970s

Garden Description

The Villa of the Little Circus rose on a high promontory two kilometers to the east of the Maritime Odeon. It overlooked the end of a long, sandy and curving beach. This once imposing residence had a 300 meter front on the sea. At the rear of the building, an area free of masonry was probably occupied by ornamental bushes and trees [A], while in the eastern part of the villa, a square peristyle, with the remains of a basin necessary for irrigation, was certainly a garden [B] and so must have been also the nearby central courtyard [C].

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 [D], shaped like a circus, occupied an area 85 meters long and 15 meters wide. Two walls enclosed its length. In its center we can still see the remains of a flowerbed, 60 meters long and 6 meters wide, shaped like the spina of a circus. Two semicircular basins of water, set at each end, stood at the places which, in a real circus, would have been occupied by the metae. A square basin [d] divided the flowerbed into two unequal parts. Viewed from a tower triclinium which stood at the western end [E], this inequality created the optical illusion of a much longer garden than the space on the top of the cliff would permit, as shown in Fig. 5.

Gardens shaped like a circus, a stadium or a hippodrome came into fashion around the end of the first century CE (Pliny. Epist. 5.6.32-40). The list of other gardens of this 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 (Lugli 1918); and the so-called Stadium of Hadrian's Villa (Hoffman 1980).

For the other villas of the Libyan coast and representations of country life on mosaics see: Mariani 1914; Mariani 1914a; Mariani 1914b; Romanelli 1922; Bartoccini 1927a; Bartoccini 1928-29; Cagiano de Azevedo 1962

Bibliography

Bartoccini, R. Ville e terme romane a Misurata Marina, Africa Italiana 1 (1927), pp. 214-225. (worldcat)
Bartoccini, R. Villa romana presso l'ex cimitero israelitico di Homs, Africa Italiana 1 (1927), pp. 226-232. (worldcat)
Bartoccini, R. Villa romana con mosaici a Gurgi (Tripoli), Africa Italiana 2 (1928-29), pp. 95-101. (worldcat)
Bartoccini, R. Il porto romano di Leptis Magna, Supplemento al Bollettino del Centro Studi per la Storia dell Architettura 13 (1958), pp. 1-222. (worldcat)
Cagiano de Azevedo, M. La data dei mosaici di Zliten, Bruxelles 1962. (worldcat)
Di Vitta, A. La villa della Gara delle Nereidi, in Supplements of Libya antiqua, Roma 1966. (worldcat)
Goodchild, R. G. Tabula Imperii Romani - Leptis Magna, Oxford 1954. (worldcat)
Guidi, G. La villa del Nilo a Leptis Magna, Africa Italiana 5 (1933), pp. 1-56. (worldcat)
Hoffman, A. Das Gartenstadion in der Villa Hadriana, Mainz am Rhein, 1980. (worldcat)
Lugli, G. La villa di Domiziano sui Colli Albani, II parte, BullCom 46 (1918), pp. 64-65. (worldcat)
Mariani, L. Musaici di Zliten, RendLinc 23 (1914). (worldcat)
Mariani, L. Nuove ricerche a Zliten in Tripolitania, RendLinc 23 (1914).
Mariani, L. Nuove scoperte di musaici a Zliten, RendLinc 23 (1914). (worldcat)
Romanelli, P. Studi e ricerche archeologiche in Tripolitania nei primi quattro anni di occupazione italiana, Nuova antologia 1916, pp. 5-23. (worldcat)
Romanelli, P. Antichità della regione di Gurgi (Tripoli), Notiziario archeologico 3 (1922), pp. 35-38. (worldcat)
Romanelli, P. Dieci anni di esplorazioni archeologiche in Tripolitania, Aegyptus 3 (1922), pp. 295-314. (JStor)
P. Romanelli, La vita agricola in Tripolitania attraverso le rappresentazioni figurate, Africa Italiana 2 (1929-30), pp. 53-75. (worldcat)
Salza Prina Ricotti, E. Ville Marittime e residenziali del Nord Africa, in Colloquii del Sodalizio 2 (1968-1970), pp. 21-32, tavv. I-III. (worldcat)
Salza Prina Ricotti, E. Le Ville di Silin, RendPontAcc 43 (1970-71), pp. 135-163. (worldcat)
Salza Prina Ricotti, E. I porti della zona di Leptis Magna, RendPontAcc 45 (1972-73), pp. 75-103. (worldcat)
Salza Prina Ricotti, E. and D. Scagiarini. Enciclopedia dell Arte antica classica e orientale, Supplemento 1970, s. v. Villa, pp. 911-916. (worldcat)

Keywords

Villa of Wadi Iala

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dates

second century CE to early third century CE

Excavation Dates

1970s to 1980s

Garden Description

The villa was excavated and restored in the 1970s and 1980s by the Libyan Department of Antiquities, under the then superintendent for Leptis Magna, Omar al-Mahjub. The complex is not conserved in its entirety (Fig. 1). Marine erosion has removed the northern part of the peristyle, that is, the ends of the two side-wings, and the entire north wing, which would have closed the peristyle on the shoe side. The peristyle [0], fronting dramatically onto the sea, served as the focal point of the villa's reception area (Fig. 2). The portico, with plastered sandstone columns, was articulated around a central garden. At the rear, some of the building's more important rooms opened onto two grand viridaria to the south of the complex. The first (b) was bounded to the south by a curved wall (Fig. 4) and to the north by a portico, onto which faced the tablinum [2] and another of the villa's reception rooms [3]. The identification of this open area as a garden was confirmed by the discovery during the excavation of a least five terracotta flowerpots, each with holes in the base to enable the roots to grow out (Fig. 3).

The second garden (c) was considerably larger, and rectangular in form (Fig. 1 and 4). A trellis must have bounded the north side, flanking the rear of the sea-peristyle's southern wing. From west to east, this wing consisted of: two diaetae (10-11); a large triclinium, sumptuously decorated with columns and marble floor and wall revetment (12); a corridor of communication between the peristyle and the rear part of the villa (13); and the master-bedroom (14).

For the originality of its plan, however, the most interesting garden sector is that to the east of the villa [d] (Fig. 5). The arrangement of this vast open area as a garden dates in all probability to the end of the second century CE - that is, after the construction and decoration of the peristyle sector of the villa and its contemporary circular bath-block. Due to marine erosion, much of the northern portion and the eastern boundary of the garden has not survived. The garden's original layout should be seen in relation to the construction of the oecus [21], backing onto the bath rotunda (cf. Fig. 1), and with the reorganization of this sector of the complex as a residential area.

Of the original garden layout four trenches survive, 30 em deep and 1.5 meters - 3 meters wide, running parallel to the shoreline. They are divided lengthwise by long, low walls. At east, the layout is only partially preserved. The tops of the trench walls are decorated with polychrome mosaics of acanthus scrolls enclosing fruit and animals (Fig. 6). Fragments of a painted frieze with Nilotic scenes hae been detached from the sides and southernmost of the two longer trenches (Fig. 1).

During the latest phase, dating most probably to the Severan or late Severan period, the southernmost trench at least must have been destroyed for the construction of the portico with adjacent scales-mosaic pavement, which bounded the garden's southern side and which abutted one of the trench walls. The construction of the portico represents the last building phase of the villa and had the function of screening off the service-quarters behind it (cf. Fig. 5).

Continued excavation is impossible because of the re-arrangement of the entire area as a new garden; we can therefore only advance hypotheses regarding the original purpose of these trenches (Fig. 8). It is conceivable that they functioned as an alternate sequence of paths (the trench with painted Nilotic decoration, for example) and flower-beds. The ancient predilection for symmetrical planning most likely influenced the layout of our trenches. One could suggest a reconstruction of nine trenches: three central ones, of greater dimensions and extending further to the west (two of this kind are conserved in fragmentary state); and six minor ones, symmetrically arranged with three on each side of the central group (two remain to the south; the group to the north has vanished completely, but can be reconstructed by virtue of their symmetry) (Fig.9). In the absence of clear excavation data, the reconstruction of one or more of the trenches as water-channels (euripi) remains highly speculative (as in Fig.10).

The whole arrangement, even in terms of its apparent novelty, can be traced back to prototypes favored by imperial patronage: one should not rule out the possibility that, taking into account the necessary adaptations, our plan belonged to a typology very much in fashion at that time as, for instance, the so-called Stadium at Hadrian's villa near Tivoli, in which in the garden in front of the Northern Hall, the pool (or euripus) is symmetrically flanked by flower-beds.

Bibliography

Omar Al Mahjub, "I mosaici della villa romana di Silin." In III Colloquio Internazionale sul Mosaico Antico (Ravenna, 1980), edited by R. Farioli Campanati, vol. 1, 299–306. Ravenna, 1983. (worldcat)
Omar Al Mahjub, 1978-1979 (1987). "I mosaici della villa romana di Silin", Libya Antiqua, 15-16 (1987), p. 69-74. (worldcat)
Adolf Hoffmann, Das Gartenstadion in der Villa Hadriana. Mainz am Rhein, 1980. (worldcat)
Luisa Musso, "Leptis Magna", Enciclopedia dell'Arte Antica, Classica e Orientale, II Supplemento, 1971-1994, vol. III, 333-347, Roma, 1995. (worldcat)
Luisa Musso, "Leptis Magna e i1 suo territorio: suburbio, ville marittime, necropoli, mausolei", in La ricerca archeologica, antropologica, etnologica, 203-208, Roma, 1997, Ministero degli Affari Esteri. Direzione Generali delle Relazioni Culturali. Missioni Archeologiche Italiane. (worldcat)
Luisa Musso, "La villa di Silin. Architettura, pittura e mosaici di una residenza marittima di eta romana in Tripolitania, forthcoming (Suppl. to Libya Antiqua). Tripoli - Roma.
Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti, "Ville marittime residenziali nel Nord Africa", Colloqui del Sodalizio s. 2a, 2: 21-32, 1968-1970. (worldcat)
Eugenia Salza Prina Ricott, "Le ville marittime di Silin (Leptis Magna)", Atti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia. Rendiconti 43: 135-163, 1970-1971. (worldcat)
Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti, "1 porti della zona di Leptis Magna", Atti della Pontificia Accademia Romana diArcheologia. Rendiconti 45: 75-103, 1972-1973. (worldcat)