I visited Villa Romana del Casale in September of 2021. It is undoubtedly among the most unique and impressive monuments of antiquity. The very short WH inscription mentions the richness of the mosaics found in practically every room of the villa, and indeed those are altogether remarkable and likely unparalleled among the surviving such artifacts in both quantity and quality.

The mosaics are almost entirely found as floor decorations. With just one or two exceptions, you view them from elevated platforms. There are a few rooms where the damage to the floor is extensive, and only the fragments of the original decorations are visible. But most of the rooms are on the opposite end of the spectrum, with a few damaged areas surrounded by well-preserved mosaics. Some rooms display amazing patterns and vignettes, and the jaws really drop when you come to one of at least a dozen rooms where the floor is veritably a canvas depicting various scenes bound by a common theme, be it pursuits of leisure, commerce, or mythology. The most impressive of all is the “Corridor of the Big Hunt”, a 66-meter long space adorned with scenes involving numerous animals and overseas voyages, although the most famous might be the "Bikini Girls", a depiction of young women engaged in athletic competition.

In Covid times, on a wide-ranging trip around Sicily, Villa Romana del Casale was the only place where advance reservations proved to be essential to get in. I made them online a few weeks before the trip for a specific time entry (with no advance payment) and was asked to present proof of reservation both by the guard at the gates and by the ticket agent at the entrance. The villa is considered to be an "indoors" site, which I expect to continue to have limits on the number of daily visitors for the foreseeable future.

A typical visit to Villa Romana del Casale will take around two hours, where the actual duration directly depends on your desire to linger to examine mosaic details. Getting to the villa is not exactly hard, but the location is far enough from the regular overnight-stay destinations, so budgeting significant driving time to get there and back may be unavoidable. The town of Piazza Armerina, whose municipality encompasses the villa, does not feature on any must-see itineraries of Sicily that I’ve seen, and therefore unlikely to be considered for an overnight stay on a common itinerary; interestingly enough, from a distance, it looks like a lovely hilltop town and actually may be worth exploring on its own merit.