Villa Romana del Casale
UNESCO World Heritage Site (Villa Romana Del Casale, Inscribed 1997), A Late Roman Country House Preserved Under Landslide Deposits With Roughly 3,500 Square Metres Of Figured Mosaic · Piazza Armerina, Sicily
A Roman landowner in the middle of Sicily floored his country house with mosaic on a scale nobody has matched, and then a landslide buried the whole thing for seven hundred years, which is why it is still there. What survives is roughly three and a half thousand square metres of figured pavement under one modern roof: a corridor sixty metres long showing wild animals being caught and crated for the arena, a hunting scene, a chariot race in a child's circus, an erotic vestibule, and a room of female athletes in what everybody insists on calling bikinis. The sheer quantity is the point. You walk over it on raised walkways under a shelter designed to light it the way daylight would have, and it takes well over an hour simply to pass along everything. It sits in empty hill country an hour from any coast, which is the only reason it is not as famous as it deserves to be. Get there for opening and the walkways are yours before the first coach comes up from the coast.
Contrada Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily, 94015, Italy
ALL TIMES UNVERIFIED FOR THIS ROW. Broadly: the villa opens daily from mid-morning to late afternoon, with a last admission an hour before closing, longer in summer and shorter in winter, and closes on 25 December and 1 January. The state-museum free first Sunday applies. Piazza Armerina's churches keep the usual long midday interval. Morgantina and the Aidone museum have separate hours and at least one weekly closing day. Confirm all of it before driving out here, because there is nothing else nearby if it is shut.
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