The Walls of Santo Stefano are the ruins of an ancient Roman villa in Anguillara Sabazia, a small town north of Rome.
Villa Romana Walls of Santo Stefano Anguillara Sabazia
History and description
The Villa Romana delle Mura di Santo Stefano is one of the best preserved monuments in the area.
The structure is thought to date back to the 2nd half of the 2nd century AD.
It is made of cement covered with a layer of yellow and red bricks.
At the time of construction, it was covered with thousands of fragments of colored marble.
It consists of a main building, a square cistern and the ruins of an apse, which used to belong to a church built in the 9th century.
In the early 12th century, the structure was abandoned. It came to be used again in the 19th century, during the cholera epidemics of 1856 and 1867, as space was needed for a cemetery.