This book lists 100 villas in the territory surrounding Rome, choosing the best preserved ones, in order to study their plans and to devise their tipology. 

Most of the excavations are decades or centuries old, and it was often difficult to have access to the archives and to gather new data. 

Each villa has its own catalogue entry, listing building techniques, decoration, thermal plants, waterworks, industrial plants such as torcularia or furnaces, finds, and a discussion on the building and its meaning.

This consistent data-base enables us to understand many things about the way the villas were built and functioned. Most of all, it becomes self-evident that the so called otium villas, entirely devoted to luxury, meditation and rest, were very few, circumscribed to great monumental estates such as the Villa dei Quintili on the Appian way. 

The other villas - the vast majority of the group - always had a residential part tightly connected with a productive part, housing torcularia, furnaces, and other productive devices. 

This means that the villas were mainly devoted to the production of goods, which were sold on the markets of Rome: wine, cheese, fresh fruit and vegetables, and other goods such as wool or tools. 

The book gives a new contribution to the question of the slave economy and slave labour, and also shows that the villas were still rich and active well beyond the II-III centuries, which for a long time have been considered the deadline of the villa economic system in central Italy.