Umbria - Roman villas

The findings

The Roman cupboard
The Tiber Valley and the hills facing it, in Roman times were considered the cupboards of Rome. Olive oil, wine, wheat, fruit were cultivated in a wide system of country villas and carried to Rome thanks to the ports along the Tiber.
The Roman villa is a complex system, equipped with production spaces for the millstones and the storehouses, but also precious rooms, wide and embellished with mosaics and frescoes, for the "otium", the lords' leisure. A kind of settlement which had a prosecution with the farmhouses which you can still see on the Apennine hills. Good looking buildings which for at least three centuries were the mover of the agricultural economy of the area. Nowadays they are in great demand as second houses. In Roman times the agricultural handicraft and commercial activity comes into being in the 1st century B. C., at the end of the social war, is particularly flourishing in the Empire age (1st cent.) and declines with the crisis of the latifundium (3rd cent.). The importance in Roman age of the Tiber Valley and the Amerino is testified by many authors, Pliny the Elder, among them, but also in recent studies. For this matter we must mention, for its quality and breadth, the excavation campaign of the University of Tucson (Arizona), which allowed, thanks to the unearthed finds, the foundation of an interesting antiquarium at Lugnano, located in the Town Hall. Here you can see also the remains of the children who died of malaria in the 5th cent. and were buried in amphoras, close to a villa already decayed.

The findings
At Gramignano, along the road from Lugnano to Attigliano, in 1988 they started the excavation of the Empire age villa, deserted during the 3rd cent. and used as a burial place in the 5th cent.. Large stretches of the external walls of the villa, built according to a single great design, and the floor in polychromatic mosaic of what must have been an extraordinary colonnaded atrium, have withstood the centuries.
In the surroundings of Alviano Scalo, in the place named Popiliano, in 1975 the remains of a Roman mansion, ascribed to Caio Popiliano, have emerged. A mosaic floor and some walls in "opus reticulatum" can be seen.

Grottos, fairies and elves
The Amerino hides treasures in its bowels as well. The presence of carbonated rocks, much fractured, the favourable hydrogeologic conditions, are the ideal situation for the formation and development of the karst grottos. Only in the territory of Lugnano, thanks to a methodical reconaissance of the "Gruppo Grotte Pipistrelli", seven of them and quite big, have been spotted.
The largest is the "Grotta delle Fate", located on Mt. Ventene, by the trail leading to the hamlet of Macchie di Amelia. According to the old fireside tales, fairies used to gather by this grotto at least twice a year, at the summer solstice and at the winter solstice and their words were carried out by the draughts running through the cavities.