An archaeological heritage site need not be merely ruins — it can also be something living. This is the idea behind the new project launched at Villa Adriana, the Unesco site in Tivoli, on the outskirts of Rome, which aims to become "alive" in the most literal sense of the word: not just a destination for visitors, but a productive landscape, as it was in centuries past, when agriculture and architecture coexisted within the same design. Making this transformation possible are the nearly three thousand olive trees scattered among the remains of the imperial residence, which this year become the heart of a structural project promoted by the Istituto Villa Adriana e Villa d'Este — the other great historic villa in Tivoli. This is no longer an experiment involving a limited number of trees, as was the case in the past when the first extra virgin olive oil of Villa Adriana was produced, but a fully operational model designed to last, involving the site's entire historic olive grove.

A special partnership for Villa Adriana

To make this model permanent, the Institute has published a call aimed at establishing a special public-private partnership, with the goal of bringing the entire productive sector of the villæ tiburtine into a coherent system. The call is open to economic operators, institutions, foundations, associations and third-sector organisations, and closes on 14 August.

Two projects are envisaged: the first concerns the management and enhancement of Villa Adriana's historic olive grove; the second, broader in scope, encompasses activities related to traditional production and the ecosystems of the Institute's other sites: the historic vineyard of Villa d'Este, the Giardino dei Semplici at the Santuario di Ercole Vincitore, beekeeping, and a historic kitchen garden at Villa Adriana inspired by the agricultural models and crops of the Roman era. Villa Adriana was an out-of-town imperial residence, built by Emperor Hadrian between 117 and 138 AD, and has been a Unesco World Heritage Site since 1999; Villa d'Este, also a Unesco site, is a sixteenth-century Renaissance villa; the Santuario di Ercole Vincitore is one of the largest sacred complexes of Roman republican architecture, built on the edge of the river Aniene during the second century BC.

A landscape to be studied and told

The cultivation of olives has been an integral part of Villa Adriana's historic landscape for several centuries: the nine cultivars present, some of them rare, include the celebrated "Albero Bello" — an olive tree approximately six hundred years old that genetic studies have identified as a unicum in the Italian olive-growing panorama. Precisely for this reason, the project aims not only to produce a quality extra virgin olive oil but also to serve as a platform for research, education and landscape stewardship, capable of weaving together the conservation of cultural heritage with the safeguarding of agricultural biodiversity. The planned activities may give rise to various locally rooted productions (olive oil, honey, grapes, medicinal herbs and other natural derivatives), following a logic of short supply chains and local development, in which economic valorisation is never divorced from environmental and cultural protection.

The Villæ as living heritage

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Until now, no complex of such size and rich decoration had been known at Villa Adriana—a structure commissioned by Hadrian but later destroyed to make way for a new and different building. "One thing is already clear," states Berta Martini, director of the Distum. "A new grand

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The initiative, strongly championed by the Institute's director Alberto Samonà, is part of a broader vision that regards Villa Adriana, Villa d'Este and the Santuario di Ercole Vincitore as a single living heritage — the Villæ tiburtine — where conservation, knowledge and enhancement intertwine in the spirit of historical continuity. These are places that do not merely safeguard the past, but continue to produce culture, landscape and biodiversity. "The heart of this initiative is the full valorisation of Villa Adriana's olive grove and of the other crops that involve all three sites," underlines Samonà, "but it looks further ahead, because our aim is to develop a model that can combine economic sustainability, the stewardship of the historic landscape and the development of local agricultural supply chains. An opportunity to bring cultural heritage into dialogue with the traditions of the territory and to promote responsible management of its resources."