The Pompeii archaeological site
said Friday that a large thermal bath complex has been uncovered
in a "once in a lifetime discovery" at the ancient Roman city
buried by the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
The find was made during excavations of a domus, a private town
house, in block (insula) 10 of the Regio IX area of Pompeii.
Experts said the spa, which is connected to a banquet hall, is
the largest and most sophisticated private thermal baths found
at a Pompeian domus.
The few other examples of such baths include those at the House
of Julia Felix, the House of the Labyrinth and the Villa of
Diomedes.
The bathhouse was found with a haul of artifacts including
personal jewelry, said site director Gabriel Zuchtriegel.
"It's a once in a lifetime discovery.
"Everything was functional to putting on a show, whose focus was
the owner himself."
"The excavation of the rooms in question, and in particular of
the peristyle," added the director of the works, Anna Onesti,
"took place thanks to an innovative method of execution, which
made it possible to reach the floor level avoiding the
dismantling of the unstable architectural elements of the
colonnade".
Archaeologists said the direct connection of the thermal spaces
to the large convivial hall (the so-called black hall, already
discovered and made known a few months ago), suggests how the
Roman house lent itself to being a real stage for the
celebration of sumptuous banquets, which in the society of the
time had a function not limited to what today we would define as
"private" in the strict sense.
On the contrary, they were precious occasions for the owner to
ensure the electoral consensus of his guests, to promote the
candidacy of friends or relatives, or simply to affirm his
social status.
The baths, composed of a calidarium, tepidarium, frigidarium
(hot, warm and cold room) and changing room (apodyterium), could
accommodate up to thirty people judging by the benches present
in the latter room.
The archaeologists said the cold room is very impressive,
composed of a peristyle, or a porticoed courtyard measuring 10 x
10 meters, at the center of which is a large pool.
The choice to locate the complex near the large triclinium
(banquet hall) refers to and meets an interpretation in
Petronius's famed satirical work the Satyricon, in which the
rich freedman Trimalchio celebrates his famous lavish dinner,
set in a Campanian city of the 1st century AD and therefore
culturally not far from the reality of Pompeii before the
eruption of 79 AD.
Before going to the banquet, the protagonists of the book,
including Trimalchio, go to a balneum (bath). The entire domus
occupied the southern part of insula 10, and must have belonged
to an important figure in local society, experts said.
The walls decorated in the 2nd and 3rd Styles demonstrate that
it had an important history behind it.
Certainly, archaeologists said, whoever owned this home must
have belonged to the city's elite in its last decades of life
and therefore felt the need to set up a space in their own home
to host numerous people, to whom they could offer rich banquets
and the opportunity to bathe and relax in the thermal baths.
The use of a temporary support structure allowed the entire
colonnade to be excavated, leaving all the wall portions in
place, and will remain to protect the entablature system (the
horizontal structure supported by the columns) until a new,
future, architectural and structural restoration project, also
serving as support for its execution.
The main entrance to the domus was to the south.
An atrium was probably located here, from which one reached a
large peristyle (colonnaded garden) that occupies almost the
entire width of the block and of which the upper parts of the
corner columns, not yet excavated, can be glimpsed.
On one side of the peristyle there was a series of rooms.
From west to east: a large oecus (living room) decorated in the
2nd style, a corridor, a small room decorated in the 4th style
and a Corinthian oecus, surrounded by at least 12 columns on
three sides, with a 2nd style megalographia which is currently
still being excavated and of which the first results were
presented in December: a frieze with still life compositions
representing game and fish products offered for the enjoyment of
guests during banquets.
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