The building was awaiting a transformation. It stood in what is now known as Insula 10, Region 9, of Pompeii, and enjoyed an enviable position on the via di Nola: an important thoroughfare leading from one of the city gates towards the forum baths. Like many houses in Pompeii, a narrow corridor funnelled visitors from the street into a central atrium that was open to the sky and lined with rooms. Some of these were decorated with sumptuous frescoes; others had been given over to a commercial bakery. Under normal circumstances, passers on the street would find the aroma of fresh bread competing with the more earthy odours emanating from a neighbouring laundry. But these were not normal circumstances. The donkey-driven mills for grinding corn lay still, and the great oven was cold, because major building works were in full swing at the property. Roof tiles, bricks, and stone were stacked in the atrium, while amphorae brimmed with quick lime, slaked lime, and lime mixed with soil to make different kinds of mortar. In a side room of the bakery, hoes and a pickaxe were carefully stored for the work ahead. But it was not to be. Instead, the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 brought change of a very different kind, transforming the building into a tomb.
Inside Region 9
All of the information about this combined bakery and residential building in the city block known as Insula 10 has been freshly won from the volcanic debris that still smothers unexcavated portions of Pompeii. The digging is granting remarkable insights into Roman life – not least a uniquely detailed glimpse of a building team at work – and has come about thanks to major conservation efforts that are under way at the site. ‘Insula 10 lies between two other insulae that were exposed in the 18th and 19th century’, says Sophie Hay, a research fellow at the University of London and member of the Pompeii media team. ‘It’s the only street frontage that was still buried on the via di Nola in Region 9. So it lies at the boundary between excavated and unexcavated parts of the city. But because the neighbouring insulae have all been exposed, Insula 10 juts out like a tongue of land. This presents a challenge when it comes to stabilising the edge of the excavated area, which needs to be carefully maintained because there is a risk of collapse when it rains heavily. Obviously, it is much easier to maintain a single straight face, rather than three sides of a rectangle. So the idea, if you like, is to lop off this tongue of land. The excavation has been born from that need.’
One of the challenges for the archaeologists investigating Insula 10 is reaching Roman ground level, because they have to dig through the many metres of volcanic material that buried the city. In the northernmost of the three rooms that made up the commercial bakery, they found traces of a tragic scene that must have played out soon after this pumice first began to rain down on Pompeii. ‘We found the bodies of two women – one younger, one older – and a four- to seven-year-old boy in the room’, says Giuseppe Scarpati, archaeologist of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. ‘We know that they died very soon after the eruption started, as their skeletons lay right on the room floor. This is a different position to many of the dead at Pompeii, who are often found higher up in the sequence of volcanic material that fell on the site, after surviving the opening phase of the eruption. These three seem to have been crushed when a wall and the ceiling of the room collapsed in on them.’
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