I quartieri degli ospiti nelle ville tardoantiche d’Italia. Fonti ed archeologia

Literary sources (spread between the Late Republican age and Late Antiquity) shed light on the existence, in Roman noble houses, of sectors expressly devoted to the accommodation of guests, whether in urban or in rural contexts. Based on these ancient texts, attempts were made by archaeologists to identify on the field these “appartements” or “chambres d’hôtes”, among complexes excavated both in the West and in the East Mediterranean (Morvillez 2002; Piras 2016; Carrié 2010 with a focus on the Western provinces). In this paper, keeping in mind the results and the limits of these previous works, we aim to review various archaeological contexts of Late Antique Italian houses where sectors for guests might be identified. Through these case-studies, our final goal is to assess to what extent the presence of these sectors for guests is relevant to a more general architectural analysis of the large Late Antique villae.