The recent excavations at Villamagna (FR), Italy, have revealed the monumental remains of a monastery and abbey church of the tenth to thirteenth centuries, and the contemporary village where the monastery’s estate workers lived. These were all situated within the ruins of a substantial imperial Roman villa known as Villa Magna, an ancient name preserved through the middle ages. These different structures of medieval Villamagna provide a pertinent case study to explore how the differing topography, construction technique and quality, and uses of buildings in a given community over time might have been experienced by the people who lived there and used them. Italian medieval archaeology, as a discipline and community of scholars, brings a Marxian approach to interpreting sites like these, and the assumptions brought to bear in Italian contexts might be usefully juxtaposed with the approaches of other subsets of our disciplines.