Site comment
In the southern sector of the city block stands a large domus of considerable standing, which has so far yielded refined reception rooms with frescoes in the II, III, and IV styles, recently published: the great black hall, the sacrarium, and the previously unpublished second-style oecus. Connected to this last room, and more precisely to the west of the entrance, a doorway opens into a small, bare, undecorated space – an apotheca – which, in the final phases of the residence’s occupation, was used as a temporary cubiculum. A bed and a few wooden pieces of furniture were placed here, perhaps while waiting for the end of the renovation works affecting the rest of the property. At the moment of the eruption, the small, secluded room was chosen as a temporary shelter by two people, waiting for the end of the lapilli fall that, for hours, had been invading every open space in the rest of the house. Thanks to the closed door, the space remained free of the pumice that instead filled the adjacent hall, effectively preventing the two unsuspecting victims from reopening the door and escaping. Trapped in the cramped little room, they met their death with the arrival of the pyroclastic flows. The opportunity to analyse the invaluable anthropological data relating to the two victims examined within the archaeological context that marked their tragic end makes it possible to recover a considerable amount of information on the daily life of the ancient Pompeians and on the micro-histories of some of them, with precise and detailed documentation, confirming the uniqueness of the Vesuvian site.
Part of a large domus in Insula 10, Regio IX, located between the blue-walled sacrarium (Room 32) and the oecus (Room 28)
Room 33
Dimensions: 2.80 × 3.50 m
The environment 33 is part of a series of rooms, from 31 to 37, which, starting from the south-west corner of courtyard 19, extend along the western front of the city block from north to south. The wall that bounds them with respect to the street is uniformly built in opus incertum, using only medium-small sized lava stones. This type of masonry is attributable to a fairly restricted chronological range, between the end of the 2nd and the mid-1st centuries BC, which is particularly important for us as it helps to place these spaces chronologically.
A small, undecorated service room used as a temporary bedroom during house renovations.
The excavation of room 33, though limited in size, presented complexities normally encountered in far more extensive areas: the presence of glass and ceramic materials, placed on the marble slab that topped the wooden shelving — itself preserved as an impression in the pyroclastic deposit — made it necessary to proceed with micro-excavation and removal, and offered the opportunity to cast the furniture, restoring for us the exact appearance of the room at the moment of the eruption. Likewise, the discovery of the victims — the first lying near the bed and provided with a significant assemblage of personal objects, the second trapped by a collapse in an extremely confined space — required careful micro-excavation and removal.
The closed door kept out the pumice but also trapped them inside
Furniture reconstructed from ash voids via plaster casting: a wooden bed (163 × 86 cm), an overturned three-legged stool, a locked chest, and a marble-topped table still bearing glass, bronze, and ceramic vessels
Woman (US 841)
35–45 years
Lateral recumbent, limbs flexed (fetal), hands near skull — had slid off the bed during the agony
Pyroclastic flow (ash suffocation) — mouth found full of ash
Died later — higher stratigraphic layer indicates she survived the initial flow longer
Gold coins, silver coins, bronze coins, gold-and-pearl earrings, silver lunula pendant, 4 carnelian gemstones, 2 iron keys
Young man (US 971)
15–20 years
Prone, upper limbs flexed at chest, crushed by collapsed western wall
Likely trauma from wall collapse — mouth was free of ash, suggesting death from injuries rather than asphyxiation
Died earlier — lowest ash layer (4–5 cm beneath him) shows he died at the very arrival of the pyroclastic current
1 iron artifact at pelvis (possibly a key); no other grave goods
Domestic building
Room
