For 13 summers, Marco Cavalieri, UCLouvain professor of Roman archaeology and researcher at the Intitute for the study of civilizsations, arts and letters (INCAL), and his team have conducted excavations near the city of San Gimignano in Tuscany. They have gradually revealed a huge villa dating from late antiquity. By 2021, an archaeological park and a museum will highlight this long-running excavation.
We’re in San Gimignano, Tuscany, 80 km from the Tyrrhenian Sea, 60 km south of Florence and 30 km north of Siena. Almost every summer since 2005, Prof. Cavalieri and his team have conducted archaeological excavations of the gigantic 10,000-square-metre Aiano-Torraccia di Chiusi villa. The site is a journey back in time, from the first phases of Romanisation (1st century BC) through late antiquity (4th-5th centuries AD) to the Early Middle Ages (6th-7th centuries AD).