The ninth excavation campaign on the site of Faragola (Ascoli Satriano) took place in September-October 2012. The research concentrated on a number of areas that are important for defining the villa’s plan, its construction phases and understanding of the functions of its spaces.

In trench IV, a monumental apsidal building was uncovered (rooms 104 and 105), in which traces of the original floor were preserved.
The overlying early medieval structures, the changes in function and the partial nature of the excavations, made it impossible to complete its plan, suggest function, or propose a late antique or early medieval date. Although the building’s typology and size may suggest the identification of the apsidal hall with a reception room almost coeval or slightly later than the restructuring of the cenatio (second half of the 5th century), other indications, such as the construction techniques and the foundation level, could ascribe the building’s construction to a phase subsequent to the use of the cenatio, that is in the full 6th century.
Another suggestion is that this building was a church with a single nave, although there is no evidence to support this working hypothesis.
From the second half of the 8th century and, presumably following an abandonment phase, the building underwent structural alterations and changes in use, of a domestic-residential nature. These interventions are legible in the modifications of the original plan by the obliteration of the longitudinal room (105) and the construction of dividing walls in the apse (104), creation of beaten earth floors, cooking stands, walls in perishable materials partially resting on pre-existing masonry walls, and tile and imbrices roofs resting on timber posts.

Immediately east of the cenatio at least four pillars were identified. Built of cobbles and brick/tile, they could be interpreted as an integral part of a portico, perhaps with a cobble paving, forming a monumental access on the eastern front of the 3rd-4th century villa. This structure seemed to have been blocked at the same time as the cenatio portico was built (second half of the 4th century). In this way, a long perimeter wall to the rural complex was created, which provided access, via a large threshold (identified during a previous campaign), to the residential centatio-baths complex.

The 2012 campaign also saw the continuation of excavation in trench VI, where in 2006 and 2009 a number of rooms belonging to a building that was topographically distant from the villa but neighbouring to it, were identified. This was probably a service structure, which between the end of the 6th and the 7th century was reoccupied and saw intense craft-working activity (iron and copper working, and perhaps glass making).

The last intervention was undertaken inside the cenatio, in the gaps created in the floor following the removal of three opus sectile, glass and marble mosaics, arranged on axis and centred with respect to the large room’s longitudinal development.