The villa complex of Tigellio

The complex, known as the villa of Tigellio, indicates an archaeological area located at the foot of the hill of Buon Cammino, a short distance from the Roman amphitheatre. Its name derives from the mistaken belief that the villa of a Sardinian musician, Tigellio Ermogene, who lived in Rome for a certain period and was a friend and acquaintance of Caesar, Octavian, Cicero and Horace. The area actually includes a residential area dating back to the end of the first century B.C.- beginning of the first century A.D., probably frequented until the VI-VII century A.D., and represents one of the most important examples in Sardinia of Roman building of this type. There are the remains of a thermal building and three houses with a tetrastyle atrium (i.e. with four columns, with Ionic capitals that were placed at the four corners of the impluvium, a central basin used to collect rainwater). The two best preserved residential buildings are the "house of the painted tablinum". , so called because of the presence in the tablinum (the room next to the atrium) of remains of valuable floor mosaics, and the "stucco house", which preserves numerous fragments of decorations in this material. The wall structures are made using the so-called frame technique, widely used in the Punic area, characterised by the use of large vertical pillars arranged at a certain distance from each other and the filling of the intermediate wall sections with small-medium stones.