“Places of continuity”: before, around, and after the end of the Roman villas in Central Italy

This chapter aims to identify and explore vertical lines of continuity that cross the well-established horizontal lines of chronological discontinuity in Late Antiquity. In other words, I will try to define which elements may have caused a differential lifespan between different settlements and living spaces that appear to be homologous and located in the same territory. My intent is therefore to outline a more articulated perception of the evolution of the landscape that occurs in different times and modalities, according to the nature of the human settlements and their ability to interact with the surrounding territory on various levels: administrative, economical, and functional. My analysis originates from the ongoing research on the site of Vignale (near Piombino, in Tuscany), where the archaeological investigation revealed – as we will see – the presence of a large Roman villa that was built between the first century BCE and the first century CE in an area inhabited since the Etruscan period. Unlike many other Roman villas in the same area, the settlement of Vignale shows an unexpected continuity of life, substantially preserving its shape until the early Middle Ages. In this long span of time, different functions were contemporary or sequentially associated to the basically unaltered physical structure of the villa, giving rise to an overall phenomenon, which might be defined as “structural resilience”. The physical structure of the Roman villa of Vignale apparently survived the collapse of the Roman world, and the site was abandoned only in the medieval period, when the community that occupied it moved to a castle located on the top of the adjacent hill. However, human occupation of the area did not cease with the disruption of the medieval castle at the end of the fourteenth century and, after a period of apparent abandonment, Vignale became relevant again as a “central place” in the geography of that territory from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries, this time assuming the shape of a large estate, hosting some 40 families of peasants, with a large mansion house. Reflecting on Vignale’s history in the perspective of the longue durée (or even in a “medium durée”), we can assume that, in terms of interactions between a single human settlement and the rest of the world, we should consider two different types of relationship, each characterized by a different temporality. The first one – that we could define as macro-economic – is the link connecting a single site with the main systems of the world in which it is inserted: the economy, administration, defence, communication, and religious organization. This kind of interaction tends to change following the transformation of those general macro-economies and the changes in the role of our settlement inside them; such inter-related development tends to unfold in the short to medium term in its duration. The second kind of relationship could be defined as micro-ecological, since it deals with the network of connections that a single human settlement, once established in a pre-existing landscape, builds with that landscape itself. This is tendentially a longue durée relationship because the human settlement becomes the anthropic part of the “natural” landscape, assuming those characters of resilience and inertia that characterize nature by definition. Most interesting, in this perspective, is that a single settlement might act as a point of contact between these two dimensions: the general macro-economic and the local micro-ecological ones. This is particularly the case when the settlement is originally the product of an economic choice made by a member of the upper classes, as in the case of a large Roman villa, and/or when the settlement is connected with a major element of infrastructure, like a road or a port. In these cases, an external – and therefore macro-economic – choice changes the previous natural landscape, adding a new element that tends to become permanent in the landscape itself, thus creating a permanent – or at least a long lasting – connection between the local micro-ecology and the regional/general macro-economies.