country residences
Like town dwellings, ranged over the whole gamut of possibilities, from simple huts and cottages through small working farms to grand villas in which the management of an estate, though generally an important factor, was strictly segregated from a luxurious quarter in which the owner could maintain a life-style appropriate to his taste and station. This last type is well represented in the archaeological record, both in the countryside devastated by the eruption of Vesuvius, and in other parts of Italy and the Empire. We also see it portrayed in Pompeian paintings and read about it in the letters of Cicero and Pliny. Generalizations are difficult, but recurrent features included peristyle gardens, grand colonnaded facades, and (on sloping ground) a podium which Vitru-vius calls the basis uillae, often containing an underground corridor (cryptoporticus). In the grandest examples, including the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum and the recently excavated villa at Oplontis, west of Pompeii, both of which have been attractively ascribed to leading families of the Roman nobility, no check was imposed upon the spatial extent of the buildings. At the same time such villas, unlike the aristocratic town-houses, were outward-looking; their colonnaded facades and terraces addressed themselves to a landscape or overlooked a garden. In the coolness and shelter of the portico the owner could stroll and philosophize, like the Younger Pliny, about the delights of nature, far from the toils of the city. (Boardman, 1986)