The story of this place
Hidden in the Sicilian interior near Piazza Armerina, this luxurious late-Roman villa, built around AD 320–360, preserves the finest and most extensive Roman mosaic floors in the world—some 3,500 square metres. A mudslide buried and protected them for centuries until systematic excavation from the 1950s. The mosaics teem with life: a 60-metre 'Great Hunt' corridor showing the capture of exotic beasts for the arena, chariot races, mythological scenes, and, most famously, ten young women exercising in what look uncannily like modern bikinis, throwing a ball and holding weights. The villa's scale and imagery suggest it belonged to a senator or even a member of the imperial family. It is one of Italy's most spectacular Roman survivals.