This volume, which was awarded Honorable Mention and a Silver Medal from the Premio Romanistico Internationazionale Gerard Boulvert, investigates the socio-economic role of elite villas in Roman Central Italy drawing on both documentary sources and material evidence. Through the composite picture emerging from the juxtaposition of literary texts and archaeological evidence, the book traces elite ideological attitudes and economic behavior, caught between what was morally acceptable and the desire to invest capital intelligently. The analysis of the biases affecting the application of modern...

Harvesting the Sea provides the first systematic treatment of the exploitation of various marine resources, such as large-scale fishing, fish salting, salt and purple-dye production, and oyster and fish-farming, in the Roman world and its role within the ancient economy.
Bringing together literary, epigraphic, and legal sources, with a wealth of archaeological data collected in recent years, Marzano shows that these marine resources were an important feature of the Roman economy and, in scope and market-oriented production, paralleled phenomena taking place in the Roman agricultural...

Examines the history, architecture, and impact of Roman villas across the Mediterranean, from their origins to the collapse of the Roman Empire.