The Pliny Project

In the first century A.D. Pliny the Younger described his country villa. Today American architecture students are learning from that two thousand year-old text.

"Miraris cur me Laurentinum uel (si ita mauis), Laurens menum tanto opere delectet; desines mirari, cum cognoueris gratiam uillae, opportunitatem loci, litoris spatiu. [You wonder why my Laurentinum (or if you prefer, my Laurens) delights me so. You will cease to wonder when you have become acquainted with the charm of the villa itself, the convenience of the location and the spaciousness of the shore.]"

In these opening lines of a letter written to his friend Gallus around the end of the first century A.D., Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus-Pliny the Younger -proudly and lovingly praised the virtues of this seaside villa at Laurentum, on the Tyrrhenian coast southwest of Rome. Although its precise location has never been pinpointed, a recent study of Pliny's Laurentine villa by a team of architecture and classics scholars provides some interesting insights into life in a Roman villa, the villa tradition in ancient Roman society, and some implications for contemporary architecture.

Pliny the Younger was so called to distinguish him from his famous uncle, Pliny the Elder, an indefatigable scholar and writer who produced the celebrated thirty-seven-volume Natural History (characterized by one scholar as "a storehouse of ancient errors"). The younger Pliny, a successful lawyer and imperial administrator, is best known to classical scholars as the author of the nine-volume Epistularium, a collection of elegantly written letters that convey a wealth of information about social, literary, political, and domestic life in first-century Rome.

Like most wealthy Romans, Pliny owned a lot of real estate, including a country place in Tuscany as well as the villa at Laurentum. Two of his letters describe these villas, and a number of scholars have used information in the letters to "reconstruct" them. Their actual locations have never been identified, however, so the reconstructions remain speculative. Pliny's letter tells us that the Laurentine villa was not far from Ostia, a busy Roman seaport at the mouth of the Tiber through which grain and other commodities from all over the empire made their way to the imperial capital. The remains of ancient Ostia-Ostia Antica-were excavated in the late 1930s, and they reveal a great deal about daily life in Pliny's time in this important crossroads of the Roman Empire.

Ruins at a site near Ostia Antica known as Scavi di Laurentum were thought for many years to be the remains of Pliny's villa, but careful investigation has proved that many features of these ruins do not correspond to Pliny's descriptions. Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti, and Italian scholar of classical architecture, has investigated another site not far from Ostia Antica known as Grotta di Piastra. She is convinced that it is the location of the Laurentine villa, but her findings have not won widespread acceptance in the archaeological community.

The Villa Tradition

Noble Romans maintained villas as rural retreats from the pressures and distractions of public life in the city, but the villa was not just a luxurious vacation home. It was part of the tradition of Roman noblesse-the presumption was that it helped its patrician owner serve society better by providing a fresh perspective on life through periodic communion with the natural world of the countryside.

Like many traditions, this one was rooted in nostalgia for earlier and simpler times. During its first few centuries, Rome grew gradually from an agrarian village on the Palatine Hill into a good-sized country town. Real urbanization probably began as early as the sixth century B.C. with the city's first major public work, the draining and paving of the Forum Romanum the marketplace in the valley between the Palatine and Capitoline Hills. By the late second century B.C., all of Rome's seven hills and the valleys between were densely built up, and the only land under cultivation within the city walls consisted of small garden plots behind the houses of wealthy citizens.

One result of Rome's urban growth was that many of its leading citizens were country born and never felt completely comfortable in the city. The public image of Cato the Censor, a native of the provincial town of Tusculum, was built largely on his vigorous defense of the ideal of the Roman citizen-farmer. Other country folk who moved to town also promoted the proposition that life was purer and more genuinely Roman than urban life. In his book The Ancient Roman City, Williams College classicist John Stambaugh points out that the writer and antiquarian Varro, who came from a rural town in the Sabine hills, "took up Cato's refrain about the moral superiority of the old Roman rural life, which would become commonplace in the literature of the Augustan Age." By Pliny's time, the Roman aristocrat's villa "indulged his traditional addiction to the soil, to the ideal of the citizen-farmer like Cincinnatus," according to Stambaugh. "No noble roman had done any serious farming since the third century B.C., of course," he points out, "but that did not dim the appeal of a quieter, more pastoral life than could be found in the city."

Interpreting The Villa

Pliny's descriptions of his Laurentine villa suggest that he was studious man of modest tastes. He does not mention rich furnishings, statues, or paintings; the only piece of furniture that he describes in any detail is a bookcase that "holds volumes deserving not only to be read but to be perused frequently." His pleasure in the villa comes from its convenient location, the nearby sea the design of the garden, and the congenial and practical arrangement of the rooms. A garden walk is encircled by boxwood and rosemary, and along its inner circuit runs "a delicate and shady vine, soft and yielding even to bare feet. Thick mulberry and fig clothe the garden; the soil, hostile to other varieties is especially favorable to them." Pliny writes with great satisfaction about a cubiculum-a small room-that serves as his study. "Whenever I retreat into this room," he writes, "I seem to have left my villa and I take great pleasure in that, especially during the Saturnalia when the rest of the house is resounding with the license and festive uproar of those days. That way neither am I a hindrance to the merriment of the household nor they to my studies."

According to Astra Zarina, a professor of architecture at the University of Washington, "It is from Pliny more than anyone else that we learn about the activities and rituals relative to the architectural spaces and settings of ancient Roman villas." Zarina is director of the university's Rome Center, housed in the fifteenth-century Palazzo Pio on the Piazza di campo de' Fiori. The university recently renovated two floors of the Palazzo as a home for its "Architecture in Rome" program, established in 1970, and a companion "Classics in Rome"' program launched in 1987 under the direction of Professor Daniel Harmon, chairman of the university's classics department. Students who enroll in these programs spend one or two academic quarters in Rome, attending lectures, taking field trips, and exploring the rich Roman heritage of classical culture. From the time the "Classics in Rome" program was conceived, it was almost inevitable that students from the two disciplines would work together. As Harmon says, "Many of the architecture students are interested in the relationship between classical building forms and the way of life that they served, so they can benefit from interacting with classicists who are studying the values and rituals of Roman life."

Zarina, Harmon, and their students have collaborated in an innovative study designed to exploit the information about the villas in Pliny's letters as rigorously as possible by combining the resources of their respective disciplines. In the spring of 1987, seven of Harmon's students produced completely new translations of Pliny's letters describing his villas. They attempted to render the descriptions as neutrally and objectively as possible, ignoring the architectural preconceptions the influenced earlier translators.

The architecture students began by building a glossary of architectural terms. The atrium, for example, was defined as the "first inner courtyard of the major axis, [which] normally has an opening in the roof (compluvium) through which rainwater falls into a basin (impluvium) in the floor." The porticus was a "sheltered walk usually featuring a colonnade on one side and a wall on the other," and the tricliniun was a "dining room attached to an inner court, furnished with a table and dining couches." The students compiled drawings of examples of these architectural components from other ancient buildings. They visited the sites of other important villas such as the Villa of Diomedes at Pompeii and the Villa Casale in Sicily. Then they turned to the new translations. "At first glance, some of the earlier translations some of the earlier translations seemed more satisfying to the architecture students because they appeared to provide answers that the new translations lacked," Harmon says. "But it turned out that most of these 'answers' were based on the translators' presuppositions rather than on Pliny's actual words."

Pliny's descriptions were specific enough to identify the general areas where the villas stood. For example, he wrote that he Laurentine villa lay seventeen miles from the city and that "it can be approached by more than one road: both the [Via] Laurentina and the [Via] Ostiensis lead there but you must leave the former at the fourteenth milestone and the latter at the eleventh." These directions allowed the students to visit some likely sites to get a sense of the villa's physical setting. They analyzed Pliny's descriptions of the classical architectural components of the villas as well as information in the letters about relationships and use of the various spaces.

"Using this knowledge, as well as their growing understanding of life in ancient Rome," Zarina says, "the students individually re-created the villas in plan, section, and axonometric views. These designs represent in an architectural whole the life and setting which Pliny so poetically describes. "The architecture students' interpretive drawings of the Laurentine villa became the centerpiece of an exhibit designed to share the results of this innovative collaboration with other students, faculty, and professionals in architecture, classics, and related disciplines. The exhibit was unveiled in Seattle last January and opened in Rome in March.

The students' interpretations reflect both the tradition represented by the classical architectural components of the villa and the diversity of ways in which it is possible to combine these familiar elements. One hypothetical villa is long and narrow, while another is essentially square. Some are rigidly rectilinear, and others have gardens that skew off at oblique angles. The classical components that the students spent so much time studying clearly served in the interpretive process not as rigid models or constraints but as a solid foundation for conceptual structures that embody individual creativity. And that appears to be what the Pliny project and "Architecture in Rome" are all about; the importance of combining an understanding of the cultural context of traditional architectural elements with an unconstrained and innovative approach to design.

"The very best of modern architecture demonstrates a quintessential understanding of its historic legacy," Zarina declares. "Exponents of the modern movement such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier knew how to integrate their cultural heritage with techno-socio-economic changes in a knowing, creative, and inventive way. They showed respect and reverence for timeless criteria: proportion, geometry, surprise, delight, and relationships to nature, climate, and site. The early modern architecture was still grounded in the humanities."

"As time went on, however," Zarina continues, "deplorable changes took place in education, including that of future architects. Latin and Greek were virtually abolished, and disciplines became increasingly specialized. The common background in the humanities that had made interaction possible between vastly different disciplines was weakened. Once, because they had this broader base of knowledge, architects were capable of working closely with other disciplines, as well as with the craft of architecture. Now many architects find themselves knowledgeable in a very narrow area and are obliged to draw on examples of classical architecture and culture in a piecemeal fashion, without actually understanding the lessons that the past has to offer."

Zarina sees interdisciplinary studies such as the Pliny project as a source of enrichment for both architects and classicists. "The architecture students had an opportunity all too rare in today's architectural education: that of synthesizing the cultural roots of architecture, its Greek and Latin terminology and classical building types, to gain a stronger conviction of architecture as the representation of man's civilizing rituals, ceremonies, and celebrations," she asserts. "The classicists, who ordinarily deal with texts, were able to relate their knowledge of classical culture and everyday Roman life to actual built form."

Next: The Palazzo Project

The next collaboration between architecture and classics students will focus on the home of the Rome Center, the Palazzo Pio. The foundations of the Palazzo rest on stones laid half a century before the birth of Christ as part of the first permanent theater in Rome, built by Gnaeus Pompeius-Pompey the Great. "This area is an almost inexhaustible resource for research in architecture, classics, and other disciplines," Zarina says. "Our architecture students have used the Palazzo Pio and its environs for many design projects. Now we hope to combine these efforts with research by the classicists on Pompey's place in history and his relationship to the life and culture of his time."

The site of the Palazzo has been in the mainstream of Roman urban life for more than two thousand years. On March 15,44 B.C., Julius Caesar was assassinated at the other end of the Porticus Pompeiana, a courtyard that stretched eastward from the Theater of Pompey. The theater probably was in use as late as the sixth century A.D., and the massive structure seems and the massive structure seems to have maintained its physical identity for many more centuries. However, erosion, vandalism, and medieval construction gradually blurred its precise geometry until, by the thirteenth century, it had virtually disappeared.

Like many old Roman buildings, the Palazzo Pio was never a single unified concept in the mind of an architect; it grew more like some sort of fungoid organism. Its structural identity has been traced back to around 1450, when Cardinal Francesco Condulmer, a nephew of the pope, bought a parcel of land where the Theater of Pompey had stood that corresponds to the site of the present Palazzo Pio, along with a sort of medieval stronghold that had grown up on the foundations of the ancient theater. This agglomeration of structural elements included a tower facing the adjacent Campo de' Fiori-an open field that eventually would become a piazza. Condulmer kept the tower intact, remodeled the rest of the structure to meet his needs and the fashions of his time, and dignified the result with the appellation palazzo. In 1600, in the Campo just a few yards from the Palazzo, the philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician Giordano Bruno was burned alive after refusing to recant ideas that the inquisition deemed heretical. In the seventeenth century, the rich and powerful Orsini family owned the Palazzo for a time, and a major transformation of the building may have occurred during their tenure. The tower on the Campo de' Fiore was demolished, and a formal three-story façade was added to one face of the building. The façade was never continued around to the side that faces the Campo, however, so today the palazzo has very diverse aspects from different view points. In the eighteenth century, the structure came to be known as the Palazzo Pio, for the Pio da Carpi family who owned it then.

Today, while Roman housewives shop for meat, fruit, and flowers in a bustling market at the foot of Bruno's statue in the Campo de' Fiori American students on the third floor of the Palazzo Pio are studying its long and colorful history as part of their effort to reestablish connections between contemporary architecture and its cultural roots.