Aiano - Torraccia di Chiusi (San Gimignano, Siena): the multiple lives of a Roman villa in central Italy, between Late antiquity and Early Middle Ages The archaeological excavations 2017-2019

The site of Aiano is in the municipality of San Gimignano (Siena, Italy), located in the territory of the ancient Roman VII regio. The site is located on the border between the Roman civic territories of Siena, Volterra and Florence, in the small Elsa valley, formed by its tributary Foci, on the axis that connects the region in and around Siena to the Arno Valley. In the Middle Ages, the via Romea or Francigena ran through this valley, over the hills, leading pilgrims from Canterbury to Rome. This late antique villa has been excavated since 2005 by a Belgian-Italian team led by Professor Marco Cavalieri (UCLouvain, Belgium). About 3,000 m2 of the settlement have been excavated. The site covers an area of about 10,000 m2, an estimate based on various geological surveys. The building presents at least six phases of occupation from the 3rd to the 7th cent. AD. Period 1: the settlement was founded, between the late 3rd and the early 4th cent. AD. The oldest building is located in the S-W area of the settlement: only the foundation walls, made of roughly hewn travertine blocks, remain in rooms A, B and E. Period 2: between the late 4th and the late 5th cent. AD, the entire settlement underwent a monumental rearrangement in multiple stages, which turned it into a veritable architectural unicum. From the late 4th century AD, the villa began to be extended with the addition of a six-foil hall in the middle surrounded by a five-foil Ambulatio. A room in the southern part has been identified as a square-layout “vestibule”. Later on, between the late 4th and the early 5th cent. AD, the layout and flooring were changed, with the six foils replaced by three foils, after closing off three of them. The combination of a central layout and an exterior Ambulatio is not so unusual in late antique architecture, but very few examples have been found in residential buildings. Only the late 4th - early 5th century floor of the central hall (trefoil hall) still remains in-situ. This was made of opus caementicium, decorated with mosaic details in geometrical and figurative patterns. It was made after the refurbishment of the previous six-foil hall into a trefoil hall. Three new rectangular rooms (H, I, L) were built after pulling down the foils, communicating only with the Ambulatio. Period 3: the site was abandoned as a residential settlement. Between the late 5th and the mid-6th cent. AD, its furnishings and building materials were taken away to be recycled and reused. Most interestingly, a large part of the reused bricks found in the villa, such as those used for the floors and worktops, is associated with the collapsed southern arch of the trefoil hall. During the third period, the spaces and functions of the building itself changed. The decorations had been deprived of their original purposes, since they had been systematically disassembled or recycled during the last stage in the life of the site, when the villa became a sort of quarry and a small-scale manufactory. Most crafts were created in some areas of the site. The location of workshops must have been dictated by the proximity of materials as well as by the state of preservation of these places. Among the decorations of the villa that were taken away, during the third period in particular, there are more than 2,000 pieces of glass sectilia. Most of them come from some pits located in the south-eastern part of the excavated site. They must have been taken to this area to be melted and reused as part of a process in which the settlement was systematically stripped. The glass sectilia originally formed panels with representations of sea fish, such as breams. These luxury products have the closest comparison to some glass fragments from Trier, dating back to the 4th century AD and presumably made by Egyptian craftsmen. Period 4: between the late 6th and the early 7th cent. AD, all workshops were closed down, and the site was therefore abandoned. Period 5: until the mid-7th cent. AD, the ruins were occasionally used as a burial ground. Neither grave contains any goods: just a small and very badly preserved metal buckle (now being restored) was found in the grave in room Q. Period 6: contemporary age; the site has been ploughed deep and flattened, layers have been cut, and walls have been shaved down to a mean depth of 75 cm from ground level. The northern area of the site has been excavated since 2017. Today we will show you a preliminary presentation of the most recent findings in Aiano. Our purpose is to show what we have found, and we would be grateful for possible suggestions and comparisons.