A villa was originally a home country of the bourgeoisie, although since its origins in Roman times the idea and function of a villa has evolved considerably. After the fall of the Republic, a villa became a small, enriched cultivating the compound, re-evolving gradually by the middle ages in luxurious houses and the bourgeoisie countries. In the modern language they can relate to a specific type of isolated suburban housing.

A villa was in the beginning a Roman house of country built for the aristocratic classes. According to Pliny elder, there were several kinds of villas, of villa Urbana, which was a country house which could easily be reached of Rome (or a different city) for one night or two, and of rustica of villa, field of farm, of manner permanent occupied by servants which had the load generally field, which would carry on the villa itself, perhaps only has in a seasonal way occupied. There was the domus, a house of city for the middle-class, and the small islands, real lower of class. Petronius Satyricon describes a range of Roman residences. There was a concentration of the imperial villas close to the compartment of Naples, particularly on the island of Capri, at Monte Circeo on the coast and Antium (Anzio). Novels rich person has escaped with the heat of summer in the hills Rome round, particularly around Tibur (Tivoli) and of Frascati (the villa of Hadrian of cf). It is said that Cicero does not have less than seven villas, oldest of what was close Arpinum, which it inherited. The youngest Pliny had three or four, whose example close to Laurentium is better known of its descriptions.

Refer Roman writers with satisfaction to self-sufficiency of their villas, where they drank their own wine and pressed their own oil. This assignment was one of the cities aristocrats play to be virtuous Roman elderly farmers, but the economic independence of rural villas later was a symptom of growing economic fragmentation of the Roman Empire. Once completed villas work have been donated to the Christian Church, they served as a basis for monasteries that had survived the disruption of war Gothic and the Lombards. An outstanding example of such a villa-turned-monastery Monte Cassino.