The Online Museum Horatianum
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Last revised:
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Here you can view select finds from previous excavations which are currently on display in the local museum in Licenza as well as some of the new material brought to light by our project. We thank the Soprintendenza Archeologica per il Lazio and the Comune di Licenza for permission to reproduce their material here.
- Click on a thumbnail to get a larger image
- The Lugli catalogue numbers refer to the following publication: G. Lugli, "La villa sabina di Orazio," Monumenti Antichi 31 (1926) 459ff. The numbers in parenthesis are the current accession numbers in the local museum.
- For the dating terminology used below, be sure to read the entry on "periodization" in the Glossary. There is much more to be seen in the Licenza Museum!
We are grateful to the Comune di Licenza and the Soprintendenza Archeologica per il Lazio for permission to include illustrations on our Web site. Please note that these are under the copyright of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
| Category | Object | Lugli Catalogue | Thumbnail |
| Architectonic elements in marble |
coffer |
A.1 |
 |
| Comment: New archival research indicates the approximate find spot of this object as the quadriporticus. Most experts agree on the identification as a coffer, though some wonder how a coffer could be so heavy. If the identification is correct, we must imagine that the villa was decorated with a whole series of such coffers, and, indeed, the new archival research has turned up records of two other fragmentary coffers. The date is uncertain, but experts say it could date between the Augustan and Antonine periods. | |||
| Category | Object | Lugli Catalogue | Thumbnail |
| Architectonic elements in marble | pilaster capital | A.6 (75231) |  |
| Comment: Several pilaster capitals and many related fragments of marble wall revetment were found in Pasqui's excavations. The new archival research locates them in the area of the quadriporticus. They probably decorated the exterior walls of the colonnades and are considered contemporaneous with them. | |||
| Category | Object | Lugli Catalogue | Thumbnail |
| Marble sculpture | standing male nude statue, lifesize | F.3 and 7 |  |
| Comment: Lugli catalogued the upper torso and feet as two unrelated items. They are now correctly combined in the local museum since the archives show that they were both found together in the area of the quadriporticus, where several other large sculptures were apparently set up in antiquity. Scholars date the piece to the early to mid-imperial period. A closer study of the sculptural remains of the villa is a desideratum! | |||
| Category | Object | Lugli Catalogue | Thumbnail |
| Wall painting | Second-style painting with female monsters | D |  |
| Comment: One of the great gaps in our documentation of the site is the provenance of the fragments of wall painting found in Pasqui's excavations. The archives simply state that they are from "various find spots," though it is also claimed that they came from "the large calidarium of the first construction of the baths." In his 1926 article, Lugli wrote: "Traces of red plaster are still visible in room G1...and in the west side of the quadriporticus. Unfortunately all the other fragments of painting were found scattered here and there without a pattern as a result of...centuries of farming so that the rooms they originally belonged to could not be ascertained" (col. 533). Pasqui divided these fragments by color of the ground, mounting them in 38 frames. The fragments were dismounted from the frames and studied anew in the early 1990s for the Bimillennium of Horace's death by R. Capelli, and the current arrangement in the local museum reflects Capelli's work (see: "Le pitture della villa di Orazio. Prime note," in Atti del convegno di Licenza, 19-23 aprile 1993 [Venosa 1994] 117-162). | |||
| Category | Object | Lugli Catalogue | Thumbnail |
| Mosaics | 3 b&w mosaics | (E) |  |
| Lugli's entries under E are fragments of mosaics in the local Museum. Here we reproduce the better preserved mosaics that are still in situ in the villa itself. | |||
| Category | Object | Lugli Catalogue | Thumbnail |
| Lead water pipes | 4 pipes | I.1 |  |
| Comment: These lead pipes were all found in the area to the west of the quadriporticus in the vicinity of the vivarium. Three are inscribed with the names of the producers (CAESERNIVS LVCERNIO FEC; P .OSTILI FIRMINI; C. IVLIVS PRISCVS F). The first two inscriptions have the form "X made [this]." The second inscription takes the form: "[Product] of X." Another pipe (which does not have an inscription on the part preserved) in this general area was found in the 1997 excavation (sector 1, area 2). | |||
| Category | Object | Lugli Catalogue | Thumbnail |
| Instrumenta Domestica | Bronze keys, locks, needles | N |  |
| Comment: These objects were mainly found at the north end of the quadriporticus or in the south part of the residence (the archival records do not clearly distinguish between these two areas). Many examples of instrumenta domestica were found in Pasqui's excavations. | |||
