At Poggio Gramignano, a Roman villa in the Terni province of Umbria, the stones speak of two very different lives. The first is familiar enough: substantial architectural remains from the imperial period, fragments of a country estate that once commanded this landscape. The second is stranger and more poignant. Sometime in the fifth century CE, the villa was repurposed as a burial ground for infants and very young children. This collection of tiny graves, discovered by excavators, attracted considerable media interest, and it is not hard to see why. The contrast between the grand, ordered world of the Roman villa and this later, urgent, makeshift cemetery is sharp and unsettling. A place of leisure and commerce became, in its decline, a place of communal grief. The site is a quiet, compelling monument to the fragility of life and the strange afterlives of buildings.
Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.
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