Phil Perkins

Excavations at Le Mura di Santo Stefano, Anguillara Sabazia

This report presents the results of excavations undertaken between 1977 and 1981 at the remarkable ruins known as Le Mura di Santo Stefano, situated near Anguillara Sabazia, just under 3 km south of Lake Bracciano. The earliest phase of occupation concerned a first-century ad farm. Around ad 200 a range of buildings was constructed, including a three-storey rectangular building lavishly decorated with nineteen types of marble, suggesting that the complex was a luxury retreat, possibly part of a latifundium. There is evidence for further activity in the third or early fourth century. In the ninth century, after a period of abandonment, part of the complex was converted into the church of Santo Stefano. The rectangular building was reoccupied and the remaining ruins used as a cemetery. It is argued that the site may have functioned as the centre of a medieval estate, part of a papal domusculta, or alternatively as a fundus of a monastic establishment. In the eleventh century the site was deserted after the skeletal remains of a least 90 individuals, along with the bones of three dogs, were interred in a pit and capped with several pieces of Roman marble sculpture.

The Villa Pigneto Sacchetti excavation: a new interpretation

The remains of the seventeenth century Villa Pigneto Sacchetti lie in Rome to the northwest of the Vatican City, on a steep slope in the Valle dell’ Inferno in the regional park of Monte Mario. Designed for the Sacchetti family by Pietro da Cortona, the leading painter of the Roman Baroque, it was one of a limited number of his architectural projects to be built. In 1990 the villa was believed lost and so a project was devised to locate and explore the material remains, the villa was partially excavated and subsequently published in the Papers of the British School at Rome 68 (2000). In 2008, Jorg Martin Merz’s much-awaited monograph, Pietro da Cortona and Roman Baroque Architecture was published. Without any doubt, this book makes a major contribution to the architectural literature of the Roman Baroque. It includes a chapter on the Villa Pigneto Sacchetti. Several points are raised about our work in the new monograph. This article offers a reinterpretation of the building history of the villa that aims to reconcile the divergent opinions and incorporate advances in scholarship since 2000.