Monumental Tomb Garden Complex
Location
Sublocation
Via Labicana
Sublocation Description
An ancient Roman road connecting Rome and Labicum.
Garden
Monumental Tomb Garden Complex
Keywords
- courtyards (uncovered spaces)AAT:300004095
- ditchesAAT:300006178
- epitaphsAAT:300028729
- funerary buildingsAAT:300005866
- sepulchral monumentsAAT:300005909
- tombsAAT:300005926
Garden Description
Two conjoining fragments of a cut marble slab found in the cemetery of Centocelle at the third mile of the Via Labicana, now in the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, show part of a plan (not drawn to scale) of a large rectangular funerary garden (546 x 524.5 Roman feet, almost exactly 10 iugera, about 5.8 acres, in area) bounded on at least two sides by a private road that branched off near the end of a longer side to intersect a public thoroughfare 1,783 Roman feet (about 1/3rd of a Roman mile) long, beside which several rectangular tomb plots, some marked with border cippi at the (rear?) corners, are marked off in a reed bed. To judge from the stippling on the stone (incompletely marked on the most frequently reproduced drawing of the plan), a second reed bed occupying a triangular plot between the shorter length of private road and a ditch on the opposite side (a subsecivum) extended perpendicularly from the short side of the triangle at the hypotenuse in a narrow band equal in width to that of the reed bed beside the public road and the private road around the perimeter of the enclosure (see the photograph in Luni, fig. 6). De Rossi believed, on no firm evidence, that the property bounded by the public road and reed bed extending off the top of the plan was productive agricultural land attached to the tomb; if so, the territory was perhaps circumscribed by a band of reedbeds and private roads of uniform width bordering the property. But since we know neither the purpose nor the original extent of the plan, the significance of the undifferentiated area outside the enclosed tomb garden remains a matter of speculation: the only features labeled on the plan are the public road, the ditch, and the stippled reedbeds.
The enclosed tomb garden, accessible only by an entranceway at the upper left corner (according to the orientation of the plan) and by a narrow door next to an aedicular structure outside the enclosure in the lower left of the plan, is characterized by a strict formality of design. The garden proper consists of eight rectangular plots marked with stippling, possibly flower beds or lawns, regularly disposed amid perfectly aligned single or triple rows of equidistant circular dots, probably representing trees. A double row of dots separated from the others along the upper perimeter perhaps represents a pergola or elevated walkway. The lower third of the enclosure is dominated by a large tower-tomb monument (perhaps 15 meters square at the base) apparently similar in form to a mausoleum near S. Maria Capua Vetere sketched by Pirro Ligorio and known as "La Conocchia" ("The Distaff"). The tower-tomb sits in the center of a rectangular courtyard bordered by a single row of trees (interrupted by the rear wall of the tomb) that form an ambulatory around the perimeter. The longest side of the courtyard, along the bottom of the plan, gave access to connecting service rooms aligned perpendicularly behind the shorter sides of the courtyard and, in the lower left, a rectangular aedicular building outside the entrance, possibly a funerary shrine or perhaps the custodian's quarters.
The plan has been dated as early as the Augustan age (by Huelsen, who favored De Rossi's fanciful attribution of the tomb complex to "Turia", fragments of whose well known epitaph were found, similarly cut for reuse in covering loculi, in the same cemetery of Centocelle [cf. CIL 6.37053 with 1527, 31670]), but the scale of the complex and the design of the monument seem more compatible with a date later in the first or second century.
The Centocelle plan provides uniquely valuable, if ambiguous, evidence for the arrangement of the planting and the disposition of the monument within a Roman tomb garden (our other surviving plan of a tomb-garden complex [see Claudia Peloris] focuses on the internal articulation of the buildings), but it can hardly be considered typical: not only is the central monument of a form and type not found elsewhere in the region of Rome (the only known parallel is at Capua), but the size of the plot dwarfs all others known in central Italy and is second in area only to the thirty-five iugera (almost twenty acres) of farm land dedicated by a Roman knight at Parma to supporting his funerary celebrations (see C. Praeconius P.f. Ventilius Magnus). If the round dots do indeed represent trees and the stippled areas flower beds, the size of the area laid out primarily, it seems, for amenity (even if the trees bore fruit and the flowers produced garlands and perfume) is far larger than that of other attested funerary gardens in Italy that served primarily a decorative purpose. Productive funerary gardens of comparable and smaller area that we can identify elsewhere in Rome and Italy were normally equipped with work buildings (aedificia) and retail outlets (bars and shops, tabernae) (see vol. 2, XXX). The spaces on the plan flanking the courtyard and identified as storerooms could well have housed farming and gardening tools, but the footprint of the structure in the lower left corner seems ill-suited to the design of a tavern. More probably a collective monument (perhaps of a funerary collegium) than a familial tomb, the complex raises more questions than it resolves about the characteristic form and function of the Roman tomb garden (see no. XXX, funerary collegium of the Cocceii).
Dates
The plan was dated as early as the Augustan age, the scale and design seem more later in the frist or second century.
Bibliography
J. Bodel, Roman Tomb Gardens, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 222-224. link
Ch. Hülsen, Piante iconografiche incise in marmo, BMDAI(R) 5 (1890): 46-63 worldcat
H. von Hesberg, Römische Grundrissplane auf Marmor, in Bauplanung und Bautheorie der Antike (Berlin 1984) 121-24;worldcat
M. Luni, Iscrizioni pubbliche ed iscrizioni relative ad edifici, in 1756-1986. Il Museo Archeologico di Urbino I (Urbino 1986) 167 figs. 6-7. worldcat
R. Volpe,Cento anni a Centocelle: dal volo di Wilbur Wright ai recenti scavi, in Atti del Convegno Nazionale di Archeologia Aerea "100 anni di Archeologia Aerea in Italia" (Roma 15-17 aprile 2009), Archeologia Aerea 4-5, 2010-2011, pp.41-46. Fig. 3 worldcat