The letter also gives us an insight into how people lived in those days. Much to be regretted was the decline of the old Roman villas along the Adriatic coast, places once greatly admired by the Roman poet Martial who compared them with their more famous counterparts in Campania. By the time the Goths occupied Italy these must have had an abandoned, ruined look; it would appear that the Goths preferred smaller houses along the lagoon, there being no obvious distinction between the rich and the poor. Their dwellings were built on a framework of reeds and beaten earth floors, though Cassidoro compared them to fragile birds’ nests, as they were raised above the ground and the water.