#Quintilii
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antiquity.ac.uk
For the Romans, wine production was often treated as a spectacle.

One winery near Rome contained opulent features such as fountains of grape must, showing how the elite romanticised agricultural labour.

Learn more 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...
June 11, 2025 at 3:25 PM
antiquity.ac.uk
Fountains were a key element of spectacle in the #Roman world. At one winery near Rome, they even had a fountain-like feature from which the wine flowed, turning wine production into a theatrical display!

🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...
March 13, 2025 at 10:53 AM
anthonymajanlahti.bsky.social
​Hot property. A cross-section from the Villa of the #Quintilii shows the brick skeleton of a massive hypocaust network, a vast thermodynamic machine designed to transform the #opussectile above into an active sensory experience, warmed from below by enslaved labour. #MosaicMonday #AncientBluesky 🏺
OPUS SECTILE LAID OVER HYPOCAUST SUSPENSURAE, C2 CE. VILLA OF THE QUINTILII ​Here is a structural cross-section revealing the brick suspension arches or suspensurae that supported the heavy bedding mortar of a heated floor, featuring opus sectile fragments of pavonazzetto and cipollino marble. This architectural skeleton illustrates the engineering required to activate the luxurious marbles for sensory comfort. Large sections of these opulent floors were suspended directly over furnace networks. To make the stones flash and glitter with colour, the villa used a thin sheet of water run across the pavements to saturate the marble without flooding them. The surrounding ruins remain haunted by the immense scale of this infrastructure, which required a huge force of enslaved labourers to fuel and maintain the subterranean furnaces. The thick layers of concrete demonstrate how builders countered the intense thermal stress that threatened to crack the precious stones above.
June 29, 2026 at 11:49 AM
antiquity.ac.uk
Commodus became #Roman emperor #OnThisDay in AD 180, aged just 18. This emperor may have enjoyed wine a little too much, as in 182/3 he had the owners of a wine-producing villa near Rome, the Quintilii brothers, killed in order to take possession of the villa!

🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...
Aerial photograph of the Villa of the Quintilii winery building, indicating the treading area (A), press beds (B1 and B2), proposed press mechanism rooms (C1 and C2), collection vat (D), cella vinaria (E), and dining rooms (F1 and F2).
March 17, 2025 at 10:15 AM
antiquity.ac.uk
Why not explore another Roman villa in Antiquity?
The Villa of the Quintilii, near Rome, was a major imperial winery. Combining function with theatre, it turned winemaking into a spectacle for the elites, complete with fountains of grape must!

🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...
The spectacle of production: a Roman imperial winery at the Villa of the Quintilii, Rome
The elites of many past cultures have sought to romanticise agricultural labour—often the source of their wealth and hence their status. A recently discovered winery at the Villa of the Quintilii on the Via Appia Antica, near Rome, provides only the second known example from the Graeco-Roman world of an opulent wine production complex built to facilitate vinicultural ‘spectacle’.
doi.org
January 13, 2026 at 10:22 AM
antiquity.ac.uk
Making wine from these grapes took on a theatrical, celebratory nature in itself. Ostentatious features at wine production centres, such as wine fountains, suggest winemaking was romanticised by Rome's elite 2/3

🔗 from 2023 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...
View of an excavated wine cellar, presses and treading floor of the Villa of the Quintilii.
August 18, 2025 at 7:13 AM
anthonymajanlahti.bsky.social
The green frames in that geometric layout are carved from #serpentino (marmor Lacedaemonium). Quarried in #Laconia since the Bronze Age, the #Romans took a stone steeped in #Homeric prestige and subjected it to hydraulic engineering, running it over #hypocausts to keep it comfy for imperial feet.
OPUS SECTILE FLOORING, C2 CE. VILLA OF THE QUINTILII ​Here we see a geometric pavement of golden giallo antico and green serpentino from the imperial villa confiscated from the Quintilii brothers by Commodus in 182. The design features a repeating grid of warm golden squares outlined by deep green borders of serpentino, punctuated at the corners by small white triangles of palombino limestone. It is a striking realisation that these deep green borders are not merely markers of Roman imperial wealth, but part of an ancient geography of power stretching back to the Bronze Age. The same stone, quarried near Sparta, has been found at the Menelaion site, where the palace of Helen and Menelaus might have stood. Walking across such surfaces, much like crossing the serpentino cobblestones ringed around the obelisk in St Peter's Square, inspires an appreciation for the millennia of history compressed underfoot.
June 29, 2026 at 12:43 PM
tompain.bsky.social
There's something about the first one that's a peak experience that I've only had a few times. The other things that gave me this feeling were reading The Lord of the Rings and Lonesome Dove, playing Morrowind, and a summer sunset at the Villa of the Quintilii all by myself.
October 21, 2025 at 1:51 PM
antiquity.ac.uk
Outside of the theatre, many aspects of Roman life took on elements of the dramatic. Wine fountains and other opulent features at an imperial winery at the Villa of the Quintilii, Rome, suggest wine production was a kind of spectacle for Roman elites.

🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...
View of the wine production complex, with the wine cellar (a flat area with holes for the deposition of sunken wine storage jars called dolia) in the foreground and treading floor and presses in the background. They are connected via a system of channels.
December 10, 2025 at 5:35 PM
timetravelrome.bsky.social
🪔 #OnThisDay in 43 BC, #Cicero was assassinated near Formiae on Mark Antony's orders. His head and hands were cut off as proof.
🪔 This bust, found at the Quintilii Villa and now in the Vatican (1817), was once thought to depict Cicero. Its identity remains debated. 📸 me
December 7, 2024 at 7:00 AM
belovedofoizys.bsky.social
I really liked this one: a 1st AD copy of Kephisodotos' 'Eirene and Ploutos' (Peace and Wealth) - excavated from the Villa of the Quintilii 8/
November 18, 2024 at 9:05 AM