Pompeii excavation

Built in the Samnite age, this is an enormous house which was divided into various small apartments to rent, with separate entrances, by its last owner. Nothing remains of its originai decoration, but the beautiful peristyle stili ex ists, surrounding a large pool instead of a garden as was more usual. This was an older house, later changed to be used as a bakery. The western half remained dwelling, with four strong brick pillars at the corners of the impluvium to raise the rooms above which were used as living quarters. In the eastern half, the garden was transformed into a pistrinum or bread bakery, with stone mills for milling, an oven for baking, a horrea for storing the grain, a stable for the animals used to turn the mill and finally, a shop for selling the finished product. To be considered one of the noblest examples of pre Roman dwellings of the Samnite age. The large Tuscan atrium with the basin for the impluvium, the characteristic doors with their tapering openings, and the walls of the airy tablinum, of the oecus facing the covered arcade and of one the cubicles, stili preserve most of the decoration in the First style, with the covering in stucco work imitating the incrustation of polycrome marble with its reliefs and colours. Of a completely different character is the small peristyle with hexagonal columns to the southern side which show us, with the diffe-rent proportions and purposes of the rooms, the style of decoration used in Pompeii during the post Augustan age. On one of the walls was painted a landscape, Actaeon surprising Ariadne in her bath, unfortunately destroyed during World War II.