Villa romana di Bocca di Magra

The Roman maritime villa at Bocca di Magra occupies terraced ground on the Caprione slope, overlooking the ancient harbour complex of Portus Lunae. Its best-preserved remains belong to a private bath suite, where the heating system and bathing rooms can still be traced.

Why it matters

Built between the mid-first century BC and the fourth century AD, the villa was part of the Roman landscape around the mouth of the Magra. Its remains show how a maritime residence adapted to the rocky slope, with rooms arranged on terraces descending toward a former shoreline now buried beneath later deposits.

What to notice

The private bath suite in the eastern wing is the clearest surviving part of the complex. In the partly collapsed caldarium, a wood-fired furnace fed a hypocaust beneath the bathing area. Brick pillars supported the suspended floor, while ceramic flues carried smoke and heat up the walls. Part of the immersion bath, or alveus, survives beneath a large rectangular basin that may have served as a swimming pool.

Other rooms include three adjoining spaces on the middle terrace, one with an apse and a cocciopesto floor, and two rooms opening onto a portico on the upper terrace. Painted plaster, polychrome marble fragments and two capitals indicate the refinement of the residential spaces. A stamped brick naming the maker C. Iulius Antimachus dates construction or rebuilding of the bathing basin to the late first century AD, during Domitian’s reign.

Context and history

The remains were noted in 1952 and more fully identified in 1959 after surveys by the Lunense Section of the Istituto Internazionale di Studi Liguri. Excavations by the Archaeological Superintendency of Liguria in the 1960s revealed the structures visible today. Finds from the surveys are held at La Spezia’s Civico Museo Archeologico “Ubaldo Formentini”; two capitals from the villa’s porticoed areas are displayed there. The site is state-owned and protected as an archaeological property.