They find middle-class apartments in Pompeii full of intact objects

The archaeological site of Pompeii (southern Italy) never ceases to amaze and announced the discovery of several apartments typical of the “middle class” with cabinets full of objects locked since the eruption that leveled the city two millennia ago.

The director of the archaeological park, Gabriel Zuchtriegelexplained in a statement that the discovery of these furnished rooms offers information on the middle and lower classes of Pompeii, “most of its population but underrepresented in sources“.

The excavation revolves around what is known as House of the Larariuma luxurious sacred space that saw the light in 2018, and the experts have now entered four of the rooms that it included, two on the first floor and another two on the ground floor, at street level.

Inside they have come across lots of furniture and objects that allow to illustrate the life of the Pompeian “middle class” at the moment that everything ended, when the Vesuvius volcano erupted in the year 79 AD, burying this Roman colony for almost two millennia.

In one of the rooms, simple and with a beaten earth floor, perhaps a pantry, there was a cupboard with five shelves and two meters high that still contains everyday objects such as glasses, plates, ceramics, small containers and amphorae.

The cabinet is in the exact place it was at the time of the eruption. and it is partly broken because the weight of the pyroplastic material caused the roof of the house to collapse. The experts will continue to investigate what the ash hides on its lower shelves, little by little to protect it.

In another room of small dimensions, without decoration on its walls, you can see a simple bed with a part of its pillow, a three-legged table with a glass on top and an open trunk, as it is believed that it was emptied by its owner at the time of escaping from the fire.

The type of bed is identical to the one found last year in the slave room of the villa.”Civita Giuluana“, exempt from any decoration, removable and without a mattress, only with a network of ropes. Inside the trunk a small ceramic plate used to eat and an oil lamp with a bas-relief in which the god Zeus is represented turning into in eagle.

In another of the rooms on the first floor, a another cupboard with plates and glasses for domestic use, a bronze basin and a “perfume burner” or “perfumer” in excellent condition. “In the Roman Empire there was a wide swath of the population that fought for their own social status (…), a vulnerable class in political crises and famines but ambitious when it came to social climbing,” Zuchtriegel explained.

That is why it is assumed that the residents of the Casa del Larario lived with the same ambition of prosperity because, although some rooms appear decorated and have some precious objects, in others wooden furniture of “extreme simplicity“.

“We do not know the inhabitants of the house but surely the culture of leisure in which the wonderful decoration of the patio represents a future that they dreamed of rather than a lived reality”, pointed out the director of the site.

The Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini, celebrated this news: “Pompeii never ceases to amaze and is a beautiful story of recoveryproof that if Italy works as a team and invests in young people, research and innovation achieve extraordinary results”.