Mosaic Madness: The Roman villas around the Val di Noto are beyond compare

I went off to university with strict instructions: no easy classes, and everything should directly support a prosperous career. I put two full academic years behind me before I could get my mother be at peace with me braking those rules to take Roman Art and Architecture.

It was the most effortless “A” I ever earned at Northwestern. Not because the course was easy, but because I treasured every minute spent with Professor Jim Packer, consumed every bit of course material with enthusiasm and found the artistic observation and analysis required of me to be something my mother had baked in to my character. I loved that class, and it laid down a bucket list of sites I’ve spent my life working through. Of those not in danger zones, the most significant left was the Villa Romana del Casale in the Sicilian countryside.

This trip, I finally got there, and it lived up to 40 years of dreaming expectations.

The Villa Romana del Casale is one of the great sights of Sicily. It’s just outside Piazza Armerina, a Baroque hill town on the edge of the Val di Noto Unesco World Heritage site. The Villa is a World Heritage Site on its own. It’s hard to throw a cannolo in heritage-laden Sicily without hitting one.

“Villa” is a bit of a misnomer. This is more of a palace, with the latest scholarly opinion thinking it may have belonged to Maximian, one of four emperors splitting ruling responsibilities in the late 3rd century. (He shared power with Diocletian, whose enormous retirement villa evolved into the town of Split.) Some sort of governmental function would explain the almost ludicrous scale here. You just can’t imagine private citizens having a complex this large and reception rooms on this scale, no matter how wealthy they were.

But you’re not here for the size. You come for the mosaics and, to a smaller extent, the preserved frescoes on the remaining walls. This is a place to be captivated by details. I have marvelled at a lot of Roman mosaics in my life, but have never seen so many wonders in one place. (The Bardo Museum in Tunis is the only thing that comes close.)

Room after room of floors surge with life. People, animals and plants are hemmed in my colourful geometric borders. If you couldn’t clearly see the lines, you’d swear they were paintings. It’s hard to get your head around the idea that all of these extraordinary scenes are comprised of tiny squares of glass and stone.

The place proclaims it’s not your average “villa” from the very first room, a massive chamber that spills out into a covered walkway like a cloister that goes around a square almost the size of a football pitch. The reception room you can see beyond that is the shape and size of a full Roman basilica rather than a domestic space. You see it all from raised walkways because nobody is allowed to tread anymore on what were made as floors. Even the most casual observer will need at least 45 minutes to walk through all of the rooms. I needed more than two hours.

There’s a wide variety of scenes and styles here; so many a modern interior designer would probably criticise the lack of consistency across the complex. These days, that’s what makes it fun. The Villa is most famous for a long, wide hallway showing the hunting for, capture and transport of wild African animals who were to be used in shows in the Colosseum and other Roman arenas. 

There’s another animal-themed room off the main quadrangle where Orpheus is charming scores of wild beasts with his songs. And another hunt. It’s a good hint that was what rich people came to the forests around here to do. The level of detail is extraordinary, though there are times you suspect the artists had never seen some of the more exotic beasts they were called upon to depict. There are some decidedly dodgy crocodiles and hippopotami. But when the artists bring hunters face-to-face with lions or wild boar they’re at their best, showing the raw emotions of both combatants.

Elsewhere, there’s an elliptical room where the floor has been turned into a chariot-racing arena, with the contestants going hell-for-leather mid race. One is even caught taking a spill, with the drivers behind him pulling hard on reigns to avoid him. 

In the family’s private rooms, as a send-up to that impressive racing art, is a room where cherubs contest each other in little carts tied to birds. Elsewhere in the private rooms, life-sized women engage in various workouts at the gym; this is the other particularly famous bit of the Villa, renown for their classical-era bikinis. 

At the entrance to the baths, a regal woman thought to be the lady of the house greets visitors with her staff behind her. There’s another set of reception spaces off to one side of the main building where the mosaics show scenes of the gods and Hercules battling across the room at a scale about twice life-sized. To be honest, if you were trying to do business in here when the floor was complete I think it might make you a bit queasy, so crazy are the proportions.

My favourite mosaic was in a semi-circular room approaching the kitchens with what would have been a fountain at its centre. Here, in one of the best places in the world to eat seafood, is an aquatic scene of a staggering variety of fish and waterfowl, interspersed with playful cherubs swimming, fishing and sailing in a seascape with exquisite colonnades of classical architecture framing the shore. 

Too much pattern can make your head spin, so I also enjoyed quieter spaces where the floors are mostly geometric designs, sometimes standing alone and sometimes framing details of plants or animals. Another of the kitchen rooms, with braids and wreaths around seasonal fruits and vegetables at their peak, would work in a home today. 

The Villa Romana del Casale was the single most crowded attraction we went to in Sicily. (Remember we skipped highly-trafficked Cefalù, Taormina and Ortigia.) Though there’s nothing but farmland for several miles around, the Villa has an enormous pay-to-exit car park in a deep valley and there’s a small mall of tourist booths on the way to the Villa from there full of pottery and other Sicilian crafts. This is definitely bus tour territory. Curiously, most of the tourists were continental Europeans. We heard only one English-speaking group come through. Though there were at least 20 individual cars there, the majority of visitors definitely came off buses. The secret, we learned, was to take your time, stand still and admire details while the bus tours flowed around you. In between them, you were often almost alone.

To be truly alone with Roman antiquity, however, you can head to another villa with murals on the other side of the Val di Noto. The Villa Romana del Tellaro was much smaller than Casale. Only the partial remains of four rooms’ floors and a hallway remain today, but the quality here is almost as good as the more famous villa. The intricately patterned hallway suggests that oriental carpets form a direct line of descent from Roman mosaics. There are more impressive hunting scenes here, a delightful vignette of lovers and a particularly fabulous tiger strolling through acanthus leaves. 

This is relatively new as a tourist site. For much of the 20th century this was an abandoned farmhouse, like so many that dot the Sicilian countryside. At some point in the ‘60s, someone discovered ancient mosaics here and started selling them out of the country on the black market. Customs officers discovered the scheme, then the government bought the house and excavated the ruins. Despite the fact it’s just a stone’s through from immensely popular Noto, this feels very undiscovered.

The Villa Romana del Casale is definitely worth a special trip. (Try Villa Trigona, as described in my introductory article, for a place to stay.) But if you can’t get that far and are in Ortigia or Noto, then at least do yourself the favour of getting to Tellaro. Both of these villas show off the incredible opulence of Sicily in the late Roman Empire. Particularly if you happened to be a Roman overlord. They created a feast for the eyes that, thanks to durable building materials, is still truly wondrous.