Marble floor of Roman villa restored underwater – The

The multi-colored marble floor of a Roman luxury villa in the Submerged Archaeological Park of Baiae on the northwest shore of the Gulf of Naples is being restored underwater. The marble mosaic covered the floor of the villa’s reception room and curved front entrance porch (protiro), an area of about 2,700 square feet.

The floor was crafted in the opus sectile style, a technique that uses varied colors, shapes and sizes of marble to puzzle together patterns and figures. It was more a complex approach than mosaic floors which were made with small, even square tiles, and much more expensive. The prized marbles often had to be imported and the skill involved in designing and laying the shaped pieces into a repeating pattern or figural scene required the finest craftsmen to accomplish.

Baiae was a fashionable seaside resort town for the wealthy that flourished from the late Roman Republic through the end of the Roman Empire (ca. 100 B.C. – 500 A.D.). It had a reputation for hedonism, as described by 1st century Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger in his epistle On Baiae and Morals:

[T]here are places also, which the wise man or he who is on the way toward wisdom will avoid as foreign to good morals. Therefore, if he is contemplating withdrawal from the world, he will not select Canopus (although Canopus does not keep any man from living simply), nor Baiae either; for both places have begun to be resorts of vice. At Canopus luxury pampers itself to the utmost degree; at Baiae it is even more lax, as if the place itself demanded a certain amount of license.

You can’t buy that kind of bad publicity. Baiae’s popularity persisted even as imperial power shifted away from Rome and the rich continued to build lavishly appointed villas on the sea. In the end it was the seismic activity endemic to the area, specifically the phenomenon of bradyseism, the rising and lowering of land caused by underground volcanic activity. Baiae appears to have sunk under the sea in two phases, the first more gradual between the 3rd and 5th centuries, the second more calamitous event in the 6th century. By the 8th century, the lower ancient city was fully submerged.

The recently-discovered opus sectile floor adorned one of the villas built at the very end of the Roman Empire shortly before Baiae was submerged. At this time the trade in high-end materials was no longer reliable making fresh supplies of large amounts of colored marbles hard to secure. The homeowner had to turn to recycled materials, ironically, to show off his wealth in floor form.

Thousands of marble pieces in hundreds of different shapes were arranged in large adjacent squares inset with smaller squares, inset with circles, inset with a center square. Smaller polygonal pieces in different colors at the corners of the largest adjacent squares form pinwheels.

This pattern had to be recreated by marine archaeologists from the marble pieces. They puzzled it out based on the cut and color of the marbles found loose on the seabed. The restoration has so far recreated three of the square sections. There is much more to left to do.