Roman Kilns

 

All year round:  Sunday     10 am -5 pm

 

 

Full price: 2 €

Reduced: 1 €

(children under the age of 14 years and over 65, visitors with the ticket of the monumental complex of the Ugo Da Como Foundation)

 

 

In Lonato - after many years of restoration campaigns - is opened to the public one of the six Roman's bricks and tiles kilns discovered in 1985.

 

The visit allows you to immerse yourself in the Roman period and to know the Lake Garda: the Benacus of the first century AD.

In this period the aristocratic families of the city of Brescia and Verona elected it for their “otia”, their stays, and here they built luxurious villas along its shores, such as Sirmione, Desenzano and Toscolano, giving the way to the establishment of numerous rustic villas, i.e. the farms of the time, scattered along the hills surrounding the southern part of the lake, often in a scenic location.

So the need of building materials rose, and the industrial area of ​​the Roman furnaces in Lonato, the only discovered so far on the Garda, active during the first and the second centuries AD, served surely about this: not only to provide the materials for building homes, villas, houses of worship, but also for the necessary infrastructures.

 

The Roman furnaces of Lonato are modest structures, made of bricks, of the "vertical" type, that is they used the heat coming from the combustion chamber, located on the bottom, to the above cooking chamber, in which the bricks were stacked to be cooked.

 

The furnace A – the better conserved and today part of the museum – has circular shape with a diameter of 6 meters and a still completely intact lower cooking surface, i.e. a perforated floor made of bricks through which the heat passed from the bottom upwards .

The structure we see today, of about one meter high from the floor of the cooking chamber, ended with a large dome where a large hole served as a chimney for the forced draught.

The other kilns, studied and now covered, are all smaller and with a square or rectangular plan, except one, that was circular as the first one.

 

Singular discovery was that of a pile of discarded bricks, ready to be used for the mending of the furnaces, certainly subjected to heavy use due to rapid changes in temperature (up to 800-850 ° C) that they suffered during the cooking cycles.

A small building, side to one of the furnaces, served perhaps as warehouse or tool storage or shelter for the workers, who had to work in this vast area.

Fragments of jars and bowls found in the area testify the common life of the workers within the complex.

We know nothing about them, nor where they came from or where they lived.

Certainly, however, they were a lot, considering the complex work required for the production of bricks, starting from the mining of clay and the provision of the timber, then move to the purification steps of the clay and to the mixture, the creation of the bricks forms, roof tiles and bent tiles of various shapes and sizes, the air drying of the products for several days until the final cooking in the furnace.

 

For reservation groups and guided tour : +39 338 9336451