The villa lies in a rural district called Caddeddi or Vaddeddi on the south bank of the 45km-long Tellaro river, about 3km from its mouth on the Mediterranean. Locally it is called the ‘Villa del Tellaro’, but I prefer to use the name of the locality, since no doubt other villas await discovery along this lush and pleasant river valley. It is not a new find. A substantial 18th- and 19th-century farm stands on the spot, and it seems that its owners were already indulging in a little surreptitious digging themselves as early as the 1950s. A local guidebook, presumably not much circulated, refers in 1962 to Roman walls and ‘traces of mosaic’, revised in its 1970 edition to read ‘ample traces of mosaic’. That winter, the archaeological authorities in Syracuse intervened, and started expropriation proceedings. Three figured mosaics, already in part uncovered by the owners inside the east wing of their farm, were raised in 1971 and taken to Syracuse for restoration. Part of the farm was demolished, and a temporary shed was put over the Roman walling of the rooms where the figured mosaics had been found. Also within the shed was the mosaic in the corridor (7 on the villa plan, see p.18) that formed the north side of the villa’s central peristyle – an ornate courtyard – but that pavement has never been lifted and remains in situ. For decades it was hidden by sand. It has a wonderfully intricate geometric pattern of interlaced laurel-wreath medallions, featuring two different types of elaborate rosette, each alternating between one circular medallion and the next. The octagons between the medallions contain an awning pattern (looking a little like a modern umbrella, seen from below). The figured mosaics were not seen in public until 2003, over 30 years after their removal from the site, when they were put on temporary show in a church in Noto. They were then returned to the site when a new cover building was finished, and the villa finally opened to the public in 2008.
A grand design
So what do we know now about the Caddeddi villa? Excavation during the 1970s and 1980s has revealed most of its ground plan, but since part of it lies beneath the farm, and the farm buildings themselves are worthy of preservation as an example of Sicilian vernacular architecture (and could potentially serve as a convenient site museum), there are inevitably still some gaps. The main block forms a compact square about 60m by 60m, with rooms arranged around a central courtyard garden bordered by corridors on all four sides (7, 23-26, and another on the east). The main show rooms, as we shall see, are likely to lie on the north side, overlooking the river. There was a small apsed room in the middle of the south side (6), perhaps a reception room or a small dining room. Only part of its geometric mosaic survived, but, as it lay inches below the main entrance into the later farm, it was a miracle that any of it was preserved at all. The southern part of the west wing, ending in an apse (27), is lost below the farm. So we do not know, for example, if there was a bath-suite here (the apse could have accommodated a hot-water pool, perhaps), or whether the baths were in a totally separate building nearby, still awaiting discovery. Our ignorance of the whereabouts of this important facility (a sine qua non for any grand rural mansion in the Roman world) is one of many unanswered questions about villa Caddeddi.
The plan is slightly misleading, in that the Roman walls marked here are not all at the same level. The peristyle and the central parts of the west and south wings are on the highest, flat part of the site, also occupied by the later farm buildings. But the ground then falls away sharply on the north and the east, and what has been excavated here are the walls of rooms that formed the substructures of the villa, used for stores and service quarters. The upper rooms in this part, belonging to what we might call the piano nobile, are totally lost. So the splendid mosaic pavements of the north corridor (7), and in rooms 9 and 10, on flat ground at the higher level, survive in a good state of preservation, but many further floors that must have once paved chambers at the same level to the north and east of them have completely disappeared. A few fragments of mosaic were found collapsed into the basement rooms, but these have not so far been made available for systematic study. One day it might be possible to reconstruct from such pieces some of the floor designs of these lost upper chambers.
