Amid the Ruins Southwestern professor divides his time between
Texas and Italy For the past 13 years, art and art history
professor Thomas Noble Howe has spent much of his time amid the
ruins of ancient Roman villas in Stabiae, Italy. Stabiae is not
a normal town site, but rather a series of enormous villas just
south of Pompeii; one villa measures 236,000 square feet. They
are built right next to one another on a high sea cliff with
stunning views of the Bay of Naples and have some of the highest
quality frescoes ever found. Stabiae was buried by the same
eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79 that wiped out Pompeii and
Herculaneum. While the specific owners of the villas are not
known, Howe has argued in a recent article that the villas at
Stabiae housed an elite community both of senators from Rome and
local “municipals,” that is, town councillors. “This was a major
scene of political power in the late Republic,” Howe said. “Some
of the most important events of the late Republic and early
Empire occurred in t