Articles by Luca Di Franco

The fertile plain of Acerra, within the Campania Felix, has yielded significant new data from the preventive excavations carried out along the Naples-Bari high-speed railway. The discoveries – mainly rustic villas and related agrarian structures – provide an unprecedented picture of the rural organisation between Acerrae, Suessula, and Atella. These settlements, dating from the late Republican to the early Imperial period and often lasting until Late Antiquity, illustrate the intensive agricultural exploitation of the area through integrated systems of villas, drainage canals, roads, and centuriations. Stratigraphic and spatial analyses reveal the coexistence of different cadastral grids, particularly the ‘Acerrae-Atella I’ and ‘Ager Campanus’ systems, testifying to successive phases of Roman territorial planning. The villas, later abandoned and reused as burial areas after the 4th century AD, mark the transformation of the rural landscape in response to broader socio-economic and political changes in the Roman Empire.