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The Ancient Italian Town-House

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

R. C. Carrington
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Extract

Until a decade or two ago, our knowledge of town-houses in ancient Italy had been obtained almost entirely by digging at Pompeii, and the dwellings uncovered in that town were regarded without question as typical of ancient Roman houses in general. The houses which thus came to be accepted as the pattern, and are still represented as such in English text-books, consisted down to the 2nd century B.C. of rooms arranged round a central atrium, and later, when Hellenistic influences had become paramount in Italy, of a combination of atrium and peristyle, the latter being added in imitation of the άυλή of a Greek house. Of late years, however, the view that these houses were typical of all Italian towns in antiquity has been challenged. The systematic excavation which is going on at Ostia, the ancient port of Rome, has revealed houses very different from those of Pompeii, comprising, not an atrium and peristyle, but many-storeyed blocks of flats, built around a central cortile, in the manner of the casamenti of modern Rome. As a result of these discoveries the pendulum tended to swing to the other extreme and the view gained ground that, if we wish to find a house representative of large cities in antiquity, it is to Ostia rather than to Pompeii that we must look. Confirmation of this view was seen in the discovery of a house of the Ostian type, dating from the 2nd century A.D., on the slope of the Capitol in Rome.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 7 , Issue 26 , June 1933 , pp. 133 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1933

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References

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4 One of these is visible to the right of plate I. The left half of the façade was broken throughduring the 1st century A.D. to make way for 3 shop. Before this was done, we may assume that it resembled the right half.

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7 One of the moststriking of theseis the ‘Houseof Pansa’ (fig. I,c),whichat present occupies awhole insula or house block. Although it was not as large as this when first erected, yet the surviving portions of the original walls show that it was of imposing size.

8 An indication of this is given by the plan of the house shown in fig. 2, a. The peristyle has here been abolished to make way for a bake-house, and the living rooms which would normally have surrounded it were placed over the atrium in a sefcnd storey.

9 Owing to the narrowness of the street, it was impossible to take a photcgraph which would givea true idea of the width of these windows. In plate VI they appear to be narrower than they actually are.

10 ProfessorMaiuri, , (Atti etc., Zoc.cit.)Google Scholar believes that this balcony dates from the Sullan age, the period of the original construction of the baths. The yellow tufa, however, which occurs in its rubble core, is of a kind which appears not to have been used as aggregate before the middle of the 1st century A.D., and makes me incline to the view that the balcony is a later addition, dating from the last decades before the eruption.

11 Though this paper is concerned primarily with themore typical and better-known houses of eachperiod,it seemed worth while to include the plan of a so-called ‘corridor–house’ at Ostia (fig. 2, c), since it shows marked similarities with a house built on the fringe of the ‘House of Pansa’at Pompeii during the 1st century B.C. (fig. I, c, Y). A comparison of these two plans, in which rooms open off both sides of a corridor running the full length of the house (Y), suggests that,evenin the less pretentious dwellings which grew up round the houses of the wealthy, a continuity of design can be traced.

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25 December 1932.

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