Roman villas

A villa rustica was what the Romans called a farmhouse or villa set in the countryside with an agricultural section, and that describes the vast majority of Roman villas. It served both as the residence of the landowner and his family and as the management centre of a farm, and it often comprised separate buildings for farm labourers and sheds and barns for animals and crops. The usual plan had two parts, a pars urbana (the main house) and a pars rustica (the farm area), sometimes with a third, the pars fructuaria, for production and storage. The adjective rustica set these working estates apart from the much rarer villa urbana, an estate with little or no agriculture near a town, and from the luxury resort villas of the Bay of Naples. Villas were often furnished with heated bath suites, and many had under-floor heating, the hypocaust. By the 4th century the word villa could simply mean an agricultural holding.

The villas in this atlas are all of the working kind, listed in the Slovenian heritage register under the same phrase, villa rustica. What you see on the ground is the building remains, presented or simply left visible, rather than standing architecture. Radvanje in Maribor is the most complete: a walled complex of about 98 by 90 metres with two residential buildings and a separate working part with stables, byres and storerooms, partly presented next to a care home. Mošnje, above the Sava, has the oldest villa in Gorenjska, built no later than the middle of the 1st century and now on a local archaeological trail; at Muljava the remains are visible beside the village church. Two of these sites carry an early medieval cemetery on top of the Roman buildings, a reminder that a good farm site stayed a good site. Each entry says how much is presented, whether it is signed, and how to reach it.