Lavish private baths found in Pompeii villa

One of the largest bath complexes ever discovered in a private home at Pompeii has been unearthed in Insula 10 of the Regio IX neighborhood. Very few households in Pompeii were wealthy enough to have their own private baths, and only three villas have bathing complexes comparable in size and complexity. Unique to this domus is the direct connection between the thermal spaces and the triclinium (the banqueting hall). This suggests that the owner offered his dinner guests the full spa experience as well as a sumptuous repast.

The bath complex consists of a calidarium (hot room), tepidarium (warm room), frigidarium (cold room) and an apodyterium (changing room) which had built in benches along its walls. The benches were large enough accommodate up to 30 people, far more people than just the homeowner’s family. The walls are painted in vivid black and red and the floor is inlaid with marbles imported from across the Roman Empire. The frigidarium is also an imposing room, featuring a peristyle (a courtyard bounded by a portico supported by columns) with brightly-painted red columns. The space measures 32 by 32 feet with a large rectangular pool at the center that could also have accommodated 20-30 people. The walls are frescoed with athletes engaged in sports, giving it the cultured vibe of a Greek gymnasium.

The domus has been excavated for two years now. Last year the exquisitely frescoed massive banqueting hall was discovered, as was a sacrarium painted with delicate frescoes set against a heavenly azure background. Archaeologists believe the spectacular home belonged to prominent local politician Aulus Rustius Verus, who would have had a long list of visitors who came to his house to transact public and private business: clients (not like customers he did work for, but rather the opposite, people who were beholden to him), business associates, voters, fellow magistrates, etc. Hosting them for a meal in his gigantic dining room and a spa experience that was demonstrated his generosity and his wealth and lubricated the gears of the Roman system of favors and support.

Banquet guests would start out in the changing room, then move to the hot room where the hypocaust heating system channeled hot air under the floor and through the walls to create a sauna-like environment. Next was the warm room where bathers could enjoy massages and a thorough cleaning by having oil applied and then scraped off with metal strigils (curved scraping tools) of various sizes. The frigidarium finished off the spa experience with a dip in the cold water to close the pores.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, enslaved workers stoked the furnace that heated the room and water. The boiler room is on the other side of the hot room, and its mechanisms have survived. A pipe that brought water in from the street connected to a lead boiler with a diversion pipe that led to the frigidarium pool and heated water from the boiler was piped into the calidarium. The pipes, boiler and the valves that controlled the inbound and outbound flow of water look so pristine that at first glimpse they could be mistaken for modern utility infrastructure.

The excavation of the bathing spaces required an innovative approach to make it possible for archaeologists to reach the floors without being forced to dismantle the columns of the peristyle. The colonnade is structurally unstable, what with having been buried by a volcano 2,000 years ago, so the team erected a temporary support structure that allowed the peristyle to be excavated with all of the columns and walls still in place. The temporary support grid will be left in place to protect the trabeation system (the horizontal beams supported by the columns) until the structure is restored and can stand on its own.

* This article was originally published here