At the heart of Puglia’s baked-gold landscape, near Gravina, lies Vagnari, a Roman estate that was far more than a farm. For three centuries, from the first to the fourth CE, this was a working vicus (village) centred on a villa, whose inhabitants lived, laboured, and eventually were laid to rest in an adjoining necropolis. The tombs here tell of a pragmatic, stratified society: simple burials for workers, more elaborate ones for overseers, all within sight of the tile kilns and olive presses that sustained them. What makes Vagnari compelling is its ordinariness, it was no imperial palace but a cog in the Roman economic machine, producing bricks, wine, and grain for distant markets. The dead, with their modest grave goods, pottery, coins, a few personal trinkets, offer a quiet, unglamorous mirror of daily life in the Roman countryside, far from the marble columns of Rome.
Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.
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