In the locality of S. Gilio, not far from the modern centre of Oppido Lucano and close to an important road which linked inland Lucania with Apulia, stands an imposing Roman villa on a series of terraces overlooking the upper Bradano valley.

The residential complex was built over the entire eastern side of the hill covering an area of circa 6.200m2. Today the monumental remains relating to the basis villae, two large bath buildings, a fountain/drinking trough and a series of cisterns (castellum aquae) are still visible.

The villa was occupied from the beginning of the 1st century B.C. until the early medieval period with changeable phases of fortune. After a period of continuous development lasting until the beginning of the 3rd century A.D. the villa was partly destroyed by fire. From the second half of the 4th A.D. century onwards the structure was again monumentalised and enriched with geometric polychrome mosaic floors, copies of African designs reproduced by local craftsmen. In this phase part of the bath complex was restructured and took on domestic and productive functions. As regards the social-cultural situation there was evidence for the presence of individuals of Christian and perhaps Hebrew faith. Following its abandonment in the in the mid 6th century the site was sporadically occupied until the 7th century A.D.

The long occupation of the site, the monumental structures and building techniques used, the quality of the finds and the evidence from inscriptions on funerary slabs and on the instrumentum domesticum suggest that the villa belonged to an important members of the urban and local elite. Probable owners may have been P.Veidius Pollio, a knight in the circle of Augustus, who died in 15 B.C., and members of the gens Valeria and perhaps the gens Iunia. (Helga Di Giuseppe)