Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewLa villa dopo la villa 2: Trasformazione di un sistema insediativo ed economico nell’Italia centrale tra tarda Antichità e Medioevo Edited by Marco Cavalieri and Carla Sfameni. Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain 2022. Pp. 324. ISBN 978-2-39061-233-9 (paperback) €35.Alessandro SebastianiAlessandro SebastianiDepartment of Classics. University at Buffalo (SUNY) Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis volume edited by Cavalieri and Sfameni is a pleasant editorial novelty of 2022 in many aspects. First, the book is part of a long line of research concerning the fate of Roman villas during late antiquity. Consequently, therefore, it deals with the recomposition of Late Roman landscapes at the dawn of the formation of Early Medieval settlements, a critical passage that affected the entire European continent with the slow but progressive disintegration of the settlement, economic, and social networks of the Roman world. The publication represents the second part of an academic initiative on the theme of Late Antique villas after the first editorial effort (La villa dopo la villa 1: Trasformazione di un sistema insediativo ed economico in Italia centro-settentrionale tra tarda Antichità e Medioevo, Presses universitaires de Louvain 2020). Secondly, the volume emphasizes the different forms that villas underwent after their abandonment, focusing on the rise of ecclesial buildings, cemeteries, and recycling and spoliation activities for specific categories of materials. Finally, the volume begins to address the inevitable question about the owners of these declined structures, as described by Sfameni in the final chapter.As mentioned, the theme is not new in the panorama of the Italian archaeological debate, and right from the title, La villa dopo la villa (Villas after Villas), this book brings to mind the pioneering work by Gian Pietro Brogiolo, La fine delle ville romane: Trasformazioni nelle campagne tra tarda Antichità e alto Medievo (S.A.P. 1996), or the fundamental reference work Villa to Village by Riccardo Francovich and Richard Hodges (Bristol Classical Press 2003). It is not a surprise that the analysis of Late Roman villas has continued, as did the discovery of new settlements and the systematic collection of new analytical data. This volume welcomes significant new information, dividing it by geographical area within Central Italy. It becomes an echo and a critical study of the themes developed by Annalisa Marzano in her monumental work of 2007, expanded in 2018 to incorporate the Late Antique Mediterranean (Roman Villas in Central Italy: A Social and Economic History, Brill 2007, and The Roman Villa in the Mediterranean Basin, Cambridge University Press 2018).The various contributions are divided between research advancements and broader regional syntheses, allowing the reader to change the desired focus from the micro- to the macroregional scale. The cases presented unfold in the regions of Tuscany, Umbria, Marche, Abruzzo, Molise, and Latium, emphasizing regional differences in terms of the number of investigated sites and their architectural monumentality. Nonetheless, what is immediately apparent to the reader is how Late Antique villas do not represent a mere rural residential habit, but rather they are fully integrated into an economical production system, which has left evident traces in all the presented cases. The pieces of evidence come as workshops, spoliation activities, and dumbing levels, and they all testify to a certain degree of specialization by the craftsmen who conducted these activities. The Late Antique economy found lifeblood in the rediscovery of the phenomenon of country villas, still similar in some respects—especially those related to agrarian production—to their predecessors from the Republican and Early Imperial periods. What changes are the agents (possessors) and the social dynamics; the Late Antique countryside now appears more like a simulacrum of the centralized Roman power of previous centuries. The economic and social attention is now more global, delocalized in the various imperial territories, some of which are already beginning to perceive the beginning of the end of an era. The owners of the villas are no more Sullan or Augustan veterans but gentes of new extradition and social climbing.As Cavalieri notes well in the introduction, the dynamics of the revival of Late Antique villas brought with them the consequences of these changes. The villa became the expression of economic productivity linked to various exploitations, while the owners architecturally interpreted living in the villas as an expression of their social status. This becomes even more evident in the moment of fracture and caesura that could be placed between the 5th and 6th centuries CE; with the beginning of the decline and the subsequent abandonment of the villas, the landscape witnessed an economic reorganization, a reflection of the political and social changes that crossed the entire Western Roman Empire. The places once devoted to producing agricultural or pastoral surplus were now places of dispossession and recycling. The rich decorations, the building materials, down to the humblest objects, all became the focus of the attention of expert craftsmen aimed at recycling metals and glass, giving new life to these materials, and perpetuating the productive function of the Late Antique villas. However, it was a brief interlude, perhaps the span of a generation, before the Late Antique landscape dissolved and the Early Medieval one took its place. The volume fits well along the line drawn by the studies of Beth Munro and the recent volume edited by Chloë Duckworth and Andrew Wilson on recycling practices in the Roman world (Recycling and Reuse in the Roman Economy, Oxford University Press 2020). In this panorama of profound changes, some villas were converted into new places of aggregation of the territory, as demonstrated by the construction of religious buildings and the continuous accumulation of burials on the ruins of the previous residential and productive structures. Churches became fulcrums of the political and administrative organization of the surrounding landscape, anticipating by a few centuries the subsequent birth of hilltop castles, a disruptive phenomenon from the ninth century CE onward.In the various chapters, as mentioned above, different approaches to the research on villas can be recognized. The works of Federico Cantini (13–34) and Franco Cambi (35–60) allow us to synthesize, through the precise selection of each case study, the revival and subsequent abandonment of the villas in Tuscany and the Tuscan archipelago. Organized chronologically, Cantini’s contribution proposes the various stages of this process, with the mid sixth century CE now fully recognized as a watershed for the social and settlement networks of these sites. Cambi proposes a first overview of the Tuscan islands, inspired by the recent excavations conducted on the Island of Elba. The birth of monasteries is predominant in the complexes of ruined villas, a typically insular phenomenon mentioned in written sources that gradually now begins to be visible from an archaeological perspective. The Umbria region is the subject of three contributions that detail the rise and fall of Late Antique villas (89–126); these works allow the archaeological evidence to be placed within a broader vision, linked more to the overall settlement network than to the individual case study. Again, the sixth century appears as the period of caesura between the concept of Late Antique productive villas and the various forms of reuse—economic and religious—that followed their abandonment. Marche, Abruzzo, and Molise represent the other three case studies (153–238), each investigated in its own chapter, while Latium concludes the series. This last region also presents an interesting example of continuity between the Etruscan and Late Antique periods, as detailed in the specific contribution by Gianfranco Gazzetti and Giuseppina Ghini (285–302).Carla Sfameni formulates the conclusions (303–12); it is clear how the interaction between the reassessment of old and the proliferation of new data is fundamental to providing new academic energy to the theme of Late Antique villas. The author also traces the directions of future investigations, emphasizing the necessary interventions to analyze the phenomenon of villas—and above all, their fate after their abandonment—in southern Italy, which is due to be covered in the third volume of this series of publications, a volume long awaited and needed.Overall, this publication represents a fundamental addition to the widely discussed topic of the end of Roman villas, providing academic readers with new insights gained from assessing archaeological data. Unfortunately, the imbalance in case studies between regions in Central Italy is inevitable; rather than being a negative point for the volume, however, it should act as an inspiration to develop and promote new archaeological research in areas such as Molise, Umbria, or Abruzzo. This would benefit the entire academic community by emphasizing the differences and similarities of a regional phenomenon that, since the late 1990s, has attracted the interests of archaeologists and historians.Notes[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 127, Number 2April 2023 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Views: 104Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724678 Views: 104Total views on this site HistoryPublished online March 07, 2023 Copyright © 2023 by the Archaeological Institute of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.