RICERCA ITALIANA     

Domestic building of Aquileia: the town and the territory

Università degli Studi di Padova

Abstract

The site of Aquileia displays a privileged field for research inside a wide area of studies, and it aims at focusing the knotted system of the Roman house. This site vaunts a very high number of findings emerged from excavations (either emergency or planned ones) during the course of time/time after time that interested the background of the ancient town and its neighbourhood from 1800 onwards, and it is represented by a vast documentation that does not have similar terms of comparison in northern Italy. Despite the contribution that the ancient town of Aquileia gives to history, it must be stressed that a complete work on the domus in town that takes into consideration the evolution in space and time, is lacking. In other words, a work that permits the analysis of the gradual development of the house in Aquileia and of contemporary society over a long period of time is needed, from the status of roman colony until its importance as a patriarchal base. This project aims at creating an interpretative model for changes that influenced the householdings of Aquileia and its site after the historical, cultural and religious changes/transformations in the long period of the town development, from the Republican Age until the Late Imperial Age. The work means to be articulated into three main stages/phases which refer to the four operative units involved.
1. The study of topographical map in town and in the site of private householdings considered in their own planimetric >>>

Principal Investigator

Jacopo Bonetto Università degli Studi di PADOVA

Research Objectives

FINAL AIMS OF THE PROJECT
Aim and focus on expected outcomes at the end of/after the first year of research and conclusion.

The expected final object of this research is the study of the house building of Aquileia and its site, in order to emphasize the evolving steps of living after cultural and religious changes during the long period of time of Aquileia’s greatness. One of the first ends of the project is filing all the domus and the villae excavated until nowadays in the site (about 50 examples are known to exist) using a database. This plan will make it possible to list together, filing and publishing a big documentation, which is still not written and not well known with the aim of reconstructing buildings in their own totality and write a planimetrical evolving map to identify the building techniques and the decorative apparatus that marks them.
In order to reach this end, the survey and filing of all the published and unpublished material will be worked out, including the re-examination of filing systems. This work will be helpful to trace a revised map of the private house buildings in Aquileia and in the countryside. Bibliographical and archive research must be integrated by inspections, to be planned together with the competent authorities in order to verify and perhaps up to date the outcomes of bibliographical research, and create, where possible, a much modern photographic documentation, and test the preservation of monuments. The >>>

First Results

Expected results, their scientifical importance and possible application.
The aim of the project is studying the householdings of Aquileia and emphasize the evolving steps of living after social and cultural changes of the domus between the Late republic Age and Late Antiquity. This research is distinguished by new tracts: firstly the domus of Aquileia were studied without the support of modern technologies, which are nowadays available. The chance of operating database systems, which can be connected together, enables the collection of a big number of datas which would be hardly possible with a different system. New technologies concerning archaeological science offer precise objects for dating which must be connected to the ones of stratigraphical research.
The excavation of the “Casa delle bestie ferite” taken as a sample and done with modern methods, is peculiar for the knowledge of the site of Aquileia, where the great part of datas come from surveys dating back to the end of 1800 and the begining of 1900.
The improving steps of filing the domus of Aquileia and the outcomes of materials and field research will create an essential means for the study of Roman private housebuilding in particular and of the Roman private housebuilding in general. This is a chapter of science that feels the need of amplifying the acquired datas of problems related to ornamental and building aspects and wants a global vision for their development during the Roman Age >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

THE QUESTION OF ARTS
This project starts from the recent interest arisen from private roman housebuilding. This theme is treated by specific bibliography and it witness the flourishing of a rich national and international number of studies. These studies (Y. Thebert,…C. S. Scott, 1997) emphasize the domus as a unique cultural context in ancient times and have a specific role of display of a system of qualities of the owner, such as, for instance, building techniques, architecture, planimetric peculiarities and decorations. This system, which was the background of the domestic life, was created according to the owner display of social, economical, cultural and religious status. The domus becomes the main object to study the ancient culture and society thanks to its rich architectectural and ornamental apparatus. This key for reading houses analysing architectural decorative technical and planimetrical aspects is recently used in many geographical contexts (for Pompei see the works by Bragantini and Scagliarini Corlaita; for Arfica see Amplissime…) and chronological ones, referring to the development of the late and Christian antiquity, both Eastern and Western (see tha studies by Duval on the houses of Apamea in Syria; F. Guidobaldi on roman late antiquity buildings: …)
These works and shared interests have studied the case of Aquileia only partially. Excavations are old dated and deep studies for a complete well articulated analysis of houses in their >>>