Villas inside and out

Although we nowadays use the word 'villa' to mean everything from a large dwelling on a hilltop to a small residential house in the city's midst, we still tend to associate this term with holidays. This is not surprising as this connection goes back a long way in history…

Villa, a Latin word, was first used during the Roman Empire to refer to luxurious country houses erected solely for the use of the upper class, the only ones able to afford them. These dwellings were located either right outside the city, in the countryside but still very close to the city, or next to the seaside, but never at the heart of a city.

These villas within easy reach of the city were thus not to live in but instead carried a very specific function: to allow wealthy Roman families to retreat from the commotion and heat of cities and enjoy fresh air and open space whenever they fancied. The Bay of Naples is in fact an excellent example of those luxurious houses as it encloses ruins of many imperial villas, including the one of Julius Caesar, since it was one of the Emperors' preferred places of retreat due to the beauty of the natural surroundings.

So from their very birth, villas were built for pleasure purposes and not for long-term living ones, and for the rich and not the poor. In fact, Romans had another name for permanent residential houses within the city - domus - which were mainly urban houses for the upper class. By contrast, insulae were the residences of the population's lower class echelons and represent the early form of modern day apartments building.

The term villa hence originally merged two defining features which, despite the development of the meaning, seem to have transcended time: first, secludedness - the luxury to be able to live alone and not in communal complexes - and pleasure - as their erection was made for the sole purpose of enjoyment away from the urban daily life… Needless to say, Romans were indeed right - enjoying peaceful holidays in picturesque dwellings away from stressful urban lives definitely sounds like a real delight…

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