Aquileia
— — the floor outlived the city.
Not only on a wall.
“Aquileia was one of the largest cities of the Roman world, close to a hundred thousand people, until Attila came through in 452. Most of it is still down there, under the wheat and the vines, never excavated. What surfaced is the floor: seven hundred and sixty square metres of fourth-century mosaic inside the basilica, a sea full of fish, a rooster facing a tortoise, crossed now on a glass walkway. People come for the day from Grado and leave quiet. The city is a field. The floor is still bright.
Aquileia, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Aquileia sits on the Friulian plain in northeastern Italy, in the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, about ten kilometres inland from the Adriatic and a short drive north of the lagoon island of Grado. Rome founded it as a frontier colony in 181 BC, and by the second century AD it had grown to nearly a hundred thousand people, one of the largest cities of the empire and the gateway between Italy and the provinces along the Danube. Attila's army destroyed it in 452, and it never recovered its scale. Today it is a small town of a few thousand, set among the farms that grew over the ruins. UNESCO listed the archaeological area and its basilica in 1998.
Most of Roman Aquileia is still underground. Founded in 181 BC at the crossing of the great roads toward the Danube, the city grew, was sacked by Attila, and was then slowly buried by the silting Natiso and centuries of farming, so that today only a fraction has been excavated. What has surfaced traces a working port: the paved forum, house foundations, and the river harbour where quays once handled cargo moving between the Adriatic and central Europe. It leaves one of the most complete buried Roman cities in the Mediterranean. The excavated streets end where the fields begin, Roman pavement giving way to wheat.
The reason most people come is the floor. Inside the basilica, beneath the present church, lies a mosaic pavement of about seven hundred and sixty square metres, laid in the early fourth century under Bishop Theodore, the largest early Christian mosaic floor in the Western world. Hidden under later flooring for centuries, it was uncovered around 1900. A glass walkway now carries visitors above it, past a wide sea scene of fish and fishermen, the story of Jonah, and a rooster set against a tortoise. Above stands the campanile that Patriarch Poppo raised in the eleventh century, seventy-three metres tall, with the Crypt of the Frescoes and its painted legend of Saint Mark below.