The project

The E-Villae project stems from a desire to enhance one of the residential and productive Roman villas located in the area between the Timavo and Isonzo rivers dating back to the classical age. This villa is known as 'della liberta Peticia' and is located a short distance from the centre of the Municipality of Staranzano. Conceived by the Municipality's Culture Office and realised thanks to the cooperation of an effective multidisciplinary network of partners, the project focuses on the combination of the rediscovery and redevelopment of antiquity and the use of the most advanced investigative technologies, in a fruitful union aimed at revealing how much the civilisation that developed here twenty centuries ago still has to tell. The conservation work carried out on the mosaic floor of the villa was the incipit of the operations carried out as part of this project. These lasted for several months and involved various sectors, contemplating historical-archival research activities flanked by geophysical investigations aimed at identifying the presence of any as yet unknown buried structures. The various stages of the project were documented with the aim of making the public aware of the type of scientific knowledge lavished to keep the structures of the villa intelligible, to make its complex historical events investigable, and to explore the coeval territorial framework, which unravelled in Roman times along the route connecting Aquileia to Tergeste. Particular emphasis was placed on the investigation and narration of the expressly female cult of the Bona Dea, to which a small shrine, which was found during the first excavation investigations of the villa in the 1950s, was dedicated. This project, therefore, intends to enhance this pearl of the territory through its historical value and to propose an idea of conservation of a cultural heritage in its broadest sense, expanding the basis for possible future interventions.