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Imperial villas, far from being just luxurious leisurely retreats or mere locales for conspicuous consumption, played a crucial role in the daily life of the Roman imperial court, as emerges from a wealth of archaeological, epigraphic and literary evidence. My doctoral research (Oxford, 2022) examined the use of imperial villas as centres for the government of the empire, and investigated the extent to which the activities that emperors performed in fulfilment of their role impacted on the design of the spaces allocated to them (reception halls, entertainment buildings, bathing facilities and dining halls).
The research that I carried out at the BSR explored this ‘public’ role of imperial residences in further detail and from a different angle, focusing on a group of seven maritime villas on the coast of northern Lazio and southern Tuscany, that were either built from scratch or altered significantly in the Trajanic period. Alongside their chronological framework, the residences under examination have two further elements in common. First, they all have large ports, as well as articulate facilities such as reservoirs and warehouses, that could hardly have been geared solely to the need of importing and exporting goods for the...