Abstract of Project Funded for FY 1999
| The House of the Large Fountain of Pompeii
Ian Sutherland, Foreign Languages Since 1983, I have been studying the domestic architecture of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. Among its hundreds of buildings I have identified a particular type of house unique to Pompeii: it has two storeys, with an open, colonnaded room upstairs, called a cenaculum. The cenaculum is located either in the façade of the house, thus offering a view into the street in front, or it is in the interior of the house, with the colonnade opening to the central atrium. My long-term goal is to bring the cenaculum house into the main stream of our knowledge of Roman architecture by publishing four or five well-preserved and important examples. The first of these, and my current project, is called the House of the Large Fountain, selected because it is the oldest surviving example of a cenaculum house in Pompeii, dated to ca. 200 BC. This large and spacious mansion seems to have been the exemplar that inspired designs for other cenaculum houses over the next two and a half centuries. |