The latest excavation campaign carried out in the Roman villa of Barberes Sud, co-directed by the company Alebus Patrimonio Histórico and the Municipal Archaeology Service, has extracted more than 4000 fragments of the mural paintings that decorated the stately rooms of a large villa of the High Empire, located next to the road that connected the Roman city of Allon with its territorium, which was the current region of Marina Baixa, along the coast.
The work, carried out on a total of 842 m², has allowed the archaeologists to discover part of the floor plan of the villa, built during the reign of the emperor Trajan, with a part for industrial use, a patio or atrium with different rooms (probably for the use of the servants) and finally a large open-air space, porticoed with large columns, destined for the garden of the house, and surrounded by stately rooms, which at the time were richly decorated. Only the foundations of this part remain.
The walls were built with rammed earth (rammed clay), and appeared to have collapsed inside the rooms and the porticoed courtyard. One of the stately rooms preserved the entire collapse of its walls, the excavation of which was a very thorough task as fragments of painted plaster were preserved. Each fragment or group of fragments was consolidated by the company's own restorers and that of Vilamuseu, prior to their extraction, and each of the layers of stucco was numbered and photogrammetrically measured (undistorted, full-scale photograph) to locate them, which will give an idea of the original composition.
Once the excavation has been completed, work has begun on the consolidation and reconstruction of the panels that decorated the room in the Vilamuseu restoration laboratory. The rich decoration of the room is beginning to be glimpsed, and it has even been possible to reconstruct part of a panel with 22 fragments of the 866 documented in this collapse, which shows a rich decoration of plant garlands, alternating with birds and topped at the top by a moulding. The Vilamuseu volunteers are taking part in the cleaning work under the direction of the Conservation Department.
Among the rest of the paintings, which are in the process of being inventoried and restored, are fragments of curved stucco, decorated to imitate fluted columns, which covered the large columns that supported the porticoed space surrounding the villa's residential garden.