The villa of the “Baths of the Painted Stuccoes” owes its name to the numerous fragments of polychrome stucco and plaster found during the excavation. It is situated in the south-eastern suburb of Rome, close to a road that was already in use in the archaic period, but which in the late Republican and imperial periods was paved and used for travel between the various landed estates. Discovered during a rescue excavation undertaken by the Superintendency in 2013, the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” has been excavating there since 2014. To date, the villa has produced a large bath complex, service rooms, rooms for entertaining and a reception room which, together with the quality of the floor, wall and ceiling decoration, confirm the residential nature of the building from the proto-imperial period onwards.

To date, there is only archaeological evidence for a link between the villa and a landed estate associated with it for the first phases of the area’s use. Despite this, the “Villa of the Baths of the Painted Stuccoes” constitutes an exceptional discovery within the panorama of settlement in the Roman countryside. Indeed, unlike many other villas it was quickly abandoned and shows no evidence of alterations in the mid-imperial, late antique period or subsequent periods. The style of the frescoes and the finds show that the villa, built in the 2nd century B.C., underwent a series of enlargements and embellishments in the Julio-Claudian period and was abandoned soon afterwards. Prior to its abandonment, the villa was systematically robbed of all furnishings and the most valuable materials. Several rooms, including a kitchen, a courtyard with an impluvium, a biclinium and an apsidal structure in opus reticulatum delimiting an exterior space can be dated to the villa’s first phases between the late Republican and Augustan period. The sumptuous baths, comprising the calidarium, tepidarium, frigidarium, laconicum, praefurnium and a natatio were built in the Julio-Claudian period. The southern extension to the complex, which includes some service rooms, others with mosaic and rubricated cement floors with and a large reception room (_triclinium_), with walls standing to up to one metre in height and completely frescoed.