Roman villa of Faragola
It was one of the last enclaves, between the 5th and 6th centuries, of great estates and of economic development linked to agriculture, livestock farming, craftsmanship and trade, while elsewhere in Italy the system was crumbling.
The cause, as of all the late antique villas in the area, appears connected to the political-military instability first of the Greek-Gothic war and, after the Byzantine reconquest, to the long phase of Langobard penetration leading to the progressive thinning and disappearance of the Roman aristocratic class[7] In the 7th century a village and farm settlement made most of the rooms usable for residential or industrial purposes (furnaces, clay settling tanks, pits for smelting metals, etc.).
In the 8th c. the village became a collection of wooden huts and farm buildings, animal enclosures, systems for the conservation of foodstuffs and spaces for artisanal and agricultural activities.
The large summer dining room (cenatio) of 128 m2 with its rich wall and floor decorations, was aimed at exalting the banquet as an important event and "showing off" the lifestyle of late antique aristocracy.
The stibadium is the most impressive part of this room, complemented by a fountain with running water and decorated with opus sectile facing and reliefs depicting dancing maenads in gold leaf in the act of offering a drink to a snake wrapped around a xystus placed on an altar, clear allusion to mysterical cults, Bacchic in particular.
Also the discovery nearby of three conical glass lamps engraved with dulcis anima pie zeses ("Sweet mind, drink, may you live") and with the Christian cross.
The small size of this type of stibadium is linked to a highly selective banquet, with a few guests allowed to lie next to the owner (dominus), regulated by hierarchical conventions, as in the description by Sidonius Apollinaris (430–481/490).
[18] The banquet itself was a show with musicians, actors, mimes, dancers, but also for the self-representation, typical of the late antique aristocratic class, in a space in which everyone, dominus and guests, respected precise social conventions and played a part, replicating the model of the imperial court.
[19] The positions of the two quadrangular carpets, with mirrors in giallo antico and pavonazzo framed by serpentine, on the sides of the stibadium underline access to the most important part of the room.
The dining room had direct visual contact with the surrounding landscape through large openings on the long sides with the use of columns or pillars, highlighting a desire make it a sort of luxurious gazebo for banquets in the countryside.
The central part of the dining room is a wide and shallow pool, using a scenographic effect with water that flowed from the stibadium filled by a complex system.
The studied placement of the opus sectile panels in glass and marbles such as porphyry, characteristic of imperial buildings and the homes of very high-ranking figures, and inserted as emblems on the central axis of the room, is linked to the view of the diners arranged on the semicircular bed.
The running water not only refreshed the environment on hot summer days, but also emphasized the colours of the opus sectile panels and marble slabs, making the space very scenic.
The use of water in such prestigious banquet buildings is known in Claudius' triclinium-nymphaeum of Punta Epitaffio in Baiae and the villa del Casale of Piazza Armerina.
[20] The floor made up of mainly reused marble slabs (perhaps recovered from the abandoned rooms of the previous villa), is organised in such a way as to suggest the specialisation of the spaces of the cenatio, with greater regularity in the central portion and a significant absence of decoration next to the entrance, where white marble slabs seem linked to a space intended for games and shows and clearly visible by the guests.
