Santa Maria Bangiargia, Donori

At Santa Maria Bangiargia, the pasts of Roman leisure and medieval devotion occupy the same ground. Here, the ruins of a Roman bathhouse, a typical feature of a country villa, with its heated rooms and social spaces, were later repurposed as the foundation for a church dedicated to Santa Maria. The thermal complex, built in characteristic opus latericium brickwork, survives as an apsed hall with three substantial corner pillars.

Only faint traces of the villa itself remain, scattered as pottery and building fragments across the surrounding fields. In the adjacent vineyard, subrectangular stone slabs, likely displaced from graves, lie piled at the field’s edge, a quiet reminder that this landscape has served the living and the dead for centuries. The site speaks not of a single moment, but of how later ages often built directly upon the comforts and structures of the Roman world.

Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.