Roman mosaics at Villa Loupian

Thursday November 25, 2010 Day 148

Happy Thanksgiving Day! Roger and I, along with four ladies, celebrated by going on an AWG cultural outing. Today’s was to Bouzigues for lunch of oysters, mussels and other seafood, which were delicious. The restaurant was right on the Etang de Thau - a saltwater pond which would probably be called a bayou in Louisiana - and the seafood was very fresh - the owners of the restaurant own oyster beds and apparently fishing boats as well.

Afterward, outside the restaurant, we watched workers preparing some nursery-sized oysters for placing in oyster beds. Here, they cement the immature oysters to strands of rope on a frame. The frames are then lowered into the water and the oysters are left to mature. This method is different from that used in south Louisiana, where the immature oysters are placed in bags which are attached to frames. The frames are floated in the water, bag-side down, for maturation.

After lunch, we moved on to the village of Loupian to view the remains of a Roman farm villa built in the 1st century CE. In the 2nd century it was converted to a hunting lodge, and an extensive array of Gallo-Roman mosaics were inlaid into the floor. Over the years the lodge was dismantled/destroyed and the mosaics were forgotten and covered with soil. In the 1930s, the area was being farmed and farmers turning the soil discovered the mosaics Unfortunately the discovery was made because the mosaics were being plowed up and therefore destroyed before anyone realized what was beneath the soil, but some of the rooms were almost complete, or had been completely restored. Others were all or mostly lost. The faded area in the pictures shows the restoration, the darker tiles are the original pattern. The empty gray space indicates areas where archeologists are not able to determine the pattern.

There is one mosaic in particular, seen above, which consists of a flat “painting” of ten small cubes. As we moved along the floor and around the corner, the shape of the cubes appeared to change continually. My description does not do justice to the effect - it was an optical illusion almost two thousand years old! I was reminded somewhat of those portraits in which the eyes of the subject seem to move as the viewer moves. Unfortunately the photo does not capture the effect either, but this particular mosaic was truly fascinating.