They unearth a 2000-year-old house in Pompeii with crockery, furniture and chests: “This is how the bourgeoisie lived”

In one room a cupboard remained closed for two thousand years with all its dishes still inside, glass saucers, ceramic bowls, vases; in another, a table still set with its furniture, a bed and a chest of drawers and are new evidence of the excavations of Pompeii, in southern Italy.

In Pompeii, excavated in the back of the “enchanted garden”, the amazing painted space with the large lararium (small sacred altar of the ancient Roman residence), unearthed in 2018, and surprisingly where an important and sumptuous, modest house was expected but full of dignity environments come to light where there is no shortage of refined objects and also many documents that the plaster made reappear incredibly.

Environments that they tell the life of the small town bourgeoisie, explains the park manager, Gabriel Zuchtriegel. “These are people who often also lived in rent and in any case outside the wealthier classes,” he says.

In the city of Campania that from 80 to. C. had become a colony of Rome was a widespread situation, he stresses, “a reality that worried a large part of the population, but until now little documented and counted”.

The world emerging from Pompeii

Faced with the astonishment of the exterior with the large and sinuous snakes and ferocious beasts that shine in the refined painting of the lararium, the walls of these rooms – which ANSA has been able to observe exclusively – are plastered but bare, without a trace of paint .

The floor is also bare, made of simple beaten earth. The services, however, are not lacking, with a good sized kitchen and latrinealmost like those found in the most important houses.

We are in Regio V, in that wedge of land where in the past the excavations of the Great Project were carried out, necessary for the safety of the World Heritage Site.

A stone’s throw from here, in fact on the same street, opens the door of the palace of Marco Lucretius Frontone, with its frescoed walls in an extraordinary third style, the marble atrium and the impluvium (part hollowed out to collect rainwater ), the large garden adorned with a magnificent peristyle, the typical loggia with columns.

“This discovery was a surprise, but for this very reason it is important to continue digging,” says the director general of the museums Massimo Osanna, who in 2018 was responsible for the park and in charge of the excavation project. “Pompeii always surprises us and the investigations that are carried out are precious because they help us shed light on its history,” he says.

And it was precisely to light a new light on events in the city and beyond those last devastating hours of 79 AD., says Zuchtriegel, who decided to use the plaster technique, as happened a few months ago for the slave room in the villa of Civita Giuliana.

Here too the plaster made the furniture reappear, the trunk of precious things emptied hastily, even if not completely, because at the bottom you can still see a lamp, a saucer, a piece of cloth.

And then again, the pillow left on the bed, the beams collapsing on the furniture, even in a room upstairs, a pack of tablets, perhaps narrowed, tied together with a string and sealed with sealing wax, as was done punctually with the important papers. “For Pompeii this find is unique”says the manager.

And again, on the ground floor, partially collapsed due to the collapse of the attic, there is a cupboard-wardrobe: really exciting, given that it has been closed with its trousseau for more than two thousand years.

Inside they were stuck plates, glasses and crockery, which will now be freed with what archaeologists refer to as a micro-excavation; later they will be cleaned like the many objects found here and there in the various rooms: a delightful painted perfume burner, a bronze jug with a small head of a refined sphinx, a large basin, also in bronze, left on the table of a room.

Objects that are added to the dozens and dozens of more detailed finds, such as the metal locks on the door, the bone hinges of the sideboard, the small bread mills for daily and domestic use, a wooden bundle leaning against the wall in which it seems to be been a warehouse.

The excavation is underway, but the idea, Zuchtriegel anticipates, is to work on a room safety project so they can be open to visitors, with a path that leads from the splendor of the house of Lucretius Frontone to the bare walls. of this house, which perhaps once – before the earthquake of 62 BC – had really been the great residence of a notable, only to be dismembered and then occupied by a less wealthy family.

Pompeii, says the Italian Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini, “never ceases to amaze”. Even more so, with this glimpse of a more modest but also incredibly current everyday life.

(HANDLE)