Italy
Piazza Armerina
Roman floor mosaics of bikini-clad athletes, buried under mud, revealed after sixteen centuries.
The mosaics run on and on: Roman women in bikinis lifting weights, hunters wrestling exotic animals onto ships, cupids fishing from tiny boats. The reds and golds stayed vivid beneath the mudslide that sealed this villa for centuries. Walking the raised boards, you watch a vanished household live.
Outside the hill town of Piazza Armerina lies the Villa Romana del Casale, a UNESCO site holding some 3,500 square metres of Roman floor mosaic across the rooms of a fourth-century aristocrat's country palace. A twelfth-century landslide buried the complex and thereby saved it; systematic excavation waited until the twentieth century. The so-called Bikini Girls, ten athletes mid-competition in startlingly modern dress, are among the few images of female sport to survive from antiquity, while the Big Hunt corridor lays out the capture of wild animals in Africa across its floor. Raised walkways carry visitors over the whole preserved plan.
Solo
Stand over a single panel for twenty minutes if you like; the mosaics reward exactly that kind of attention.
Family
Bikini athletes, wild-animal hunts and floor-borne comics captivate children from the safety of the walkways.
- Some 3,500 square metres of Roman mosaic floor survive across the villa's rooms.
- The Bikini Girls panel shows ten athletes competing, a rare surviving image of female sport in antiquity.
- A medieval landslide buried the villa and preserved it for centuries.
- The Big Hunt corridor lays out the capture of wild animals in Africa across its floor.
Arancine travel well, which makes them the mosaic-day lunch of choice.
Nero d'Avola, Sicily's big dark red, suits the interior's cooler evenings.
Troy
Turkey
Nine cities layered on top of each other where Homer's war may have actually happened.
Myra
Turkey
Rock-cut Lycian tombs stacked like a honeycomb above the church where Saint Nicholas was bishop.
Gettysburg
United States
Fifty-one thousand killed, wounded or missing in three days, on fields where silence still weighs.
Port Arthur
Australia
Honey-coloured ruins and harbour gardens disguise the machinery of Britain's convict punishment.
Comacchio
Italy
Canals thread a brick lagoon town whose fortunes have always swum in on the eels.
Scilla
Italy
Homer's sea monster laired here, now swordfish boats patrol the Strait of Messina at dawn.
Orta San Giulio
Italy
A village on a lake you've never heard of, facing an island with one silent monastery.
Pompeii
Italy
Frozen mid-stride in 79 AD, bread still in the ovens, graffiti still on walls.