Ruderi Romani di Clusane

Along the lakefront of Clusane, a fishing village of Iseo, a row of blind arcades in the old lake wall is all that shows above ground of a large Roman villa. Excavations around it have traced heated, frescoed rooms and mosaics, a residence in use from the first to the fifth century, and a staircase reused in the Middle Ages.

Why it matters

Villas lined the Roman shores of the Sebino, and almost all of them have vanished under later building. At Clusane the lake-facing front of one such residence still stands in the open air: a sequence of blind arcades, at least five and two more easily counted, broken by a niche, incorporated into the houses of via Molino. Regional heritage reporting ranks these remains, after those of Marone, as the best-preserved Roman context on the lake. The archaeological record includes a nineteenth-century account of an early dig beneath the village castle and 1997 investigations that exposed the villa's substructures, collapse layers and building sequence, allowing archaeologists to date the complex from the first to the fifth century AD.

What to notice

The visible arcades sit low on the lakefront, and form the base of a larger structure: they are the substructure of a building that rose in terraces towards the water. An excavation to the east in 1997 uncovered a wall of split stone and mortar, kept for about four metres in length and eighty centimetres in height, running parallel to the shore and joined to two masonry channels; its technique, together with mosaic tesserae and crushed-tile mortar in the levels above, marks it as Roman and as part of the villa. The collapse layer over it, more than a metre thick, yielded black and white mosaic cubes, painted plaster in white, red and yellow, a marble architrave carrying traces of an inscription, and the terracotta piers of a raised-floor heating system, the suspensurae that warmed bath suites. All of this points to a genuine residence with expensive finishes, comparable to the excavated villa at Predore further down the shore. In the village, a Roman staircase of large squared blocks was reused between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries to link the settlement inside the walls with its landing place.

Context and history

Curiosity about the site is old. From the nineteenth century antiquaries studied the villa and the so-called Roman baths of Clusane, and the Brescian scholar Gabriele Rosa described an excavation of 1850 made beneath the medieval castle of the village, during which a conduit came to light feeding small cells beside the lake that resembled bath basins, with mosaic pavements found beneath them, now below the water. Rosa also recorded an inscription dedicated to Jupiter that the antiquary Scipione Maffei had taken to Verona, and praised the small arches of split, well-squared limestone still outlining architraves and vaults. A modern phase of archaeological investigation began in 1997 during restoration work near the lakefront, enabling a stratigraphic reading of the standing structures. The evidence showed occupation running from the Roman period deep into the late Middle Ages, with parts of the villa adapted rather than abandoned; the staircase linking village and shore belongs to that afterlife. The villa is provisionally dated between the first and fifth centuries AD, based on excavated material.