Gli ambienti absidati nell’architettura residenziale dell’Italia settentrionale tardoantica

The surge in urban and rural elite house construction in late antique northern Italy largely reflects the growing importance of the region between the 4th and the 6th centuries A.D. Not by chance, luxury domus and monumental villas tend to aggregate in and around the imperial and provincial capitals of Milan, Ravenna and Aquileia, and in towns such as Verona, Rimini, Faenza and Cividale del Friuli, where civilian and military bureaucrats clustered. This new residential architecture is chiefly marked by the construction or addition of apsidal rooms, which served as triclinia and/or reception halls. This paper discusses a selection of apsidal rooms in domus and villas of northern Italy in the light of the political and social development affecting the area in Late Antiquity.