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Heritage classified

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Origin and history

The Gallo-Roman villa of Andilly-en-Bassigny, discovered in 1879 during the construction of a railway line, was partially destroyed before being searched in 1895 by Virgile Multier, parish priest of the village. The research revealed a residential complex from the 1st century, enlarged to the 2nd and occupied until the 4th century, including remarkably preserved private baths (vestiary, warm room, hot pool, oven and cold pool). These remains bear witness to the opulence of the local Gallo-Roman aristocracy and its Romanized way of life.

Forgotten and then rediscovered in the 1960s, the villa was the subject of new excavations by P. Ballet and T. Zeyer, which confirmed its importance. A Merovingian necropolis of about 100 graves (VI-7th centuries) was also discovered, attesting to the funeral reuse of the ruins after the abandonment of the site. These discoveries illustrate the transition between late antiquity and the high Middle Ages in Bassigny, a rural micro-region in the northeast of the Haute-Marne.

Listed as a historical monument in 1986, the villa is now owned by the departmental council. Its exceptional state of conservation, especially for the thermal baths, makes it a rare testimony of Gallo-Roman domestic architecture in rural areas. The site is part of a landscape marked by the Meuse and Saône watershed, between Celtic and Roman influences, reflecting the progressive integration of local elites into the Empire.

The municipality of Andilly-en-Bassigny, typically rural and dispersed, also retains traces of its medieval and revolutionary history, such as the late creation (1793) of its supervisory committee. However, it is the villa which constitutes its most emblematic heritage, linked to a period when the region, then called Pagus Bassiniacus, served as a crossroads between the Roman trade routes and the territories of the Lingons.

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