VI Spaces and Places

Extract

Pictures and spaces, like literary texts, tell a story. This chapter, together with the Survey's envoi, tackles a range of these stories. At our first two sites we focus on painted landscapes in suburban villas (the Villa ‘Farnesina’, and the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta, near Rome). The next two, the famous but now mostly lost Horti Sallustiani and Porticus of Pompey, open a window onto the political and civic role of peri-urban Roman landscape gardens. Rounding off the survey, a stroll around the parkland of the emperor Hadrian's villa near Tibur (modern Tivoli) uses the contemporary site to reflect on villa visits then and now.