Overview

Q. Aurelius Symmachus is, without doubt, one of the protagonists of the socio-political events that affected Rome in the second half of the 4th century. His epistolary, stratified and steeped in Romanitas, is the manifesto of the late antique aristocracy and represents the most valid instrument to read in filigree the operative methods, public practices and private activities of the summates viri, sometimes bitterly at odds, overwhelmed by moments of violent acceleration, or entangled in a condition of peaceful and vigilant coexistence. The letters also make it possible to investigate a very relevant and articulated theme, which is the subject of this study: the real estate and land patrimony of the orator disertissimus, the analysis of which is circumscribed, despite the fact that it was much more extensive, to the properties in Rome and the possessions included in that territorial context, which cannot be delimited with immediacy, identified as the 'suburbio simmachiano'. Within the confines of present-day Latium, the lar of the Caelian and other - not better known - domus, the residences of the Vatican and the via Appia, in an area barely distant from the Urbe, characterised by a structural parcelling out, the property located at the seventh mile of the via Ostiense, the Ostiense praedium, the villa Arabiana, in the ager Laurens, the diversorium of Praeneste and the villae-stationes of Cora and Formiae, connected to Campania. Symmachus' epistolary allows us to reconstruct the identity characteristics of the residences, the choices and settlement dynamics of Symmachus, the organisation and management of the estate, the origin of the patrimony, the interactions between architecture and the environment, the 'symptoms' of that morbus fabricatoris from which the orator claims to be afflicted, the promotion of restorations, the supervision of building site activities, within a space where Symmachus' places, not always locatable, construct the landscape.

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