Ricotti, S.P. (2026). "Villa of the Little Circus." Gardens of the Roman Empire, accessed October 2, 2026. https://roman-gardens.github.io/id/506c8bf97f/

Villa of the Little Circus

Author: Salza Prina Ricotti
Contributor: Amelia Lamis
Published: 2026-10-01
Last modified: 2026-10-02

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

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Keywords

Places