Peopling Roman Palaces

Research on imperial residences has long focused on the ways architecture expressed imperial authority and staged the ceremonial life of the court. Far less attention has been paid to the practical realities that made these vast estates function as living environments. Imperial palaces were not sustained by emperors and elites alone. They depended on a large and diverse population of administrators, servants, artisans, guards, and other workers whose labour underpinned their daily operation. Evidence from sites such as the Sessorian Palace in Rome makes clear that these communities were not marginal to palace life, but integral to it (Ravasi et al., 2026).

Peopling Roman Palaces takes this broader social world as its starting point. Rather than viewing imperial residences only as settings for representation, ceremony, and elite display, the project approaches them as complex inhabited environments shaped by a wide range of needs and functions. It investigates architectural innovation not only as an expression of imperial power, but also as a response to the demands of management, logistics, security, sanitation, and everyday labour. In this perspective, the built environment of imperial residences emerges not simply as the backdrop to court life, but as an active framework through which diverse communities were housed, organised, controlled, and mobilised. This shift in focus allows us to reconsider low- and mid-ranking inhabitants not as peripheral figures, but as central actors in the life of the palace (Ravasi in press).

Within this wider framework, Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli provides an exceptionally rich case study. Long celebrated as a masterpiece of imperial architecture and as a symbol of luxury, power, and design innovation, the villa has traditionally been studied through the spaces associated with the emperor and his court. Yet the estate was also a place of work, service, movement, and permanent occupation, animated by the many individuals whose labour sustained it. Peopling Roman Palaces re-examines the villa from this perspective, asking how its architecture responded not only to imperial self-representation but also to the requirements of the communities who kept it running (Ravasi in press).

A central focus of this investigation is the Hundred Chambers, a vast complex deliberately separated from the villa’s elite quarters. Their scale, organisation, and position within the estate make them a particularly revealing context for exploring how architecture accommodated a resident workforce and supported the practical functioning of the palace. The study of these buildings shows how concerns such as circulation, surveillance, service provision, and sanitation were embedded in architectural design. In this way, the Hundred Chambers offer crucial evidence for understanding how imperial power was not only displayed in monumental form, but also sustained through systems of labour, infrastructure, and everyday organisation.

To investigate these questions, the project combines architectural analysis with advanced methods of recording and documentation. Detailed structural analysis of the whole complex is integrated with large-scale 3D documentation to reconstruct the organisation, functioning and successive transformations of the built environment with greater precision. This approach makes it possible to examine not only the design of individual buildings, but also their construction, articulation, and relationship to one another across the estate. By documenting the complex as an interconnected architectural system, the project can identify how different sectors were planned, adapted, and maintained, and how their design responded to both representational ambitions and practical needs. 

This architectural work is further developed through hydraulic analysis and the assessment of sanitary infrastructure, accessibility, control, and movement across the complex. Examining the management of water, drainage, latrines, sewers, and related service systems helps clarify how the complex functioned on a daily basis and how different buildings were equipped to sustain long-term occupation. At the same time, the study of routes, thresholds, levels of access, and patterns of circulation makes it possible to reconstruct how people, resources, and services moved through the complex, and how visibility, restriction, and supervision were built into its spatial organisation. Taken together, these strands of analysis do more than explain how the buildings worked. They help assess the ideas underpinning their design, revealing how architecture mediated between practical needs, social hierarchy, labour organisation, and imperial ambition. 

Geophysical investigations extend this analysis beyond the built core of the villa, revealing how the estate was integrated into its wider landscape. These surveys help reconstruct how access and movement towards the monumental vestibule were organised and controlled, while also shedding light on the environmental and infrastructural networks that sustained daily life across the estate. The villa thus appears not as an isolated architectural masterpiece, but as a complex and carefully managed world in which buildings, routes, resources, and human activity were closely interconnected.

By placing the experiences of often overlooked groups at the centre of analysis, Peopling Roman Palaces challenges traditional narratives of imperial residences as spaces defined solely by luxury and self-representation. It shows instead that architectural innovation was also driven by the demands of habitation, labour, and organisation. Imperial residences emerge, in this view, not simply as monuments of power, but as dynamic social environments in which architecture mediated the relationship between authority, work, and daily life.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the Ministero della Cultura, Villa Adriana e Villa d'Este, Massimo Osanna (Direttore Generale Musei and Direttore, Istituto Autonomo Villa Adriana e Villa d'Este), Elisabetta Scungio (Dirigente Delegato), Sergio Del Ferro (Funzionario Archeologo, Responsabile di Villa Adriana), and Sabrina Pietrobono (Funzionario Archeologo) for granting permission for our research and for their invaluable support.

Thea Ravasi