Pliny the Younger

==Villas, farms and estates==

[[File:BellagiodiEst.JPG|thumb|255px|View of [[Bellagio (Italian region)|Bellagio]] in [[Lake Como]]. The institution on the hill is [[Villa Serbelloni]], believed to have been constructed on the site of Pliny's villa "Tragedy."]]

Being wealthy, Pliny owned many [[villa]]s and wrote in detail about his villa near Ostia, at Laurentum, Italy.<ref>Letter 2.17</ref> [[Pliny's Comedy and Tragedy villas|Others]] included one near Lake Como named "Tragedy" because of its location high on a hill, and, another, "Comedy," on the shores of the lake, so called because it was sited low down,<ref>{{cite book |page=5 |title=The villas of Pliny from antiquity to posterity |first= Pierre |last=de la Ruffinière Du Prey |edition=illustrated |publisher=[[University of Chicago Press]] |year=1994 |isbn=978-0-226-17300-9}}</ref> referencing the practice of actors in comedy wearing flat shoes, while those in tragedy wore high-heeled [[buskin]]s.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Nutting|first=Herbert C.|title=Cicero and the Younger Pliny|year=1926|journal=The Classical Journal|volume=21|issue=6|page=427}}</ref>

Pliny's main estate in Italy and the one he loved best was his [[Roman Villa of Pliny "in Tuscis"|Villa "in Tuscis"]] near [[San Giustino]], Umbria, under the passes of Bocca Trabaria and Bocca Serriola, where wood was harvested for Roman ships and sent to Rome via the [[Tiber]].<ref>Pliny Epistulae 4.1</ref>

As a response to "declining returns from his north Italian farms", Pliny may have contemplated switching the administration of his estate to a [[sharecropping]] system called ''colonia partiaria''. Under the sharecropping system, Pliny's slaves would act as overseers.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Byres |first1=T. J. |title=Sharecropping and Sharecroppers |date=1983 |publisher=Frank Cass |location=/pl |isbn=1135780021 |page=7 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DVWQAgAAQBAJ |access-date=4 August 2019}}</ref>