KITCHENS AND DINING ROOMS AT POMPEII ... - Get a Free Blog

limited: cooking and eating in the very same space, or cooking on the ground floor and dining
above. In small houses and work(shop)-houses, there was rarely more than one place to cook or
one place to eat, but these two activities were at least discreetly separated from each other. In
larger houses, by comparison, there are rooms with different degrees of openness onto gardens,
with different orientations and with lighting suitable for different seasons. 12 Several dining areas
with various decorative styles and themes allowed the host to choose a particular setting for the
season or occasion. For example, in the Casa del Citarista (I.4.5+25), diners might enjoy the
sculptural display and fountain that face the broad summer dining room (18), or the large painted
mythological scenes on the walls of the more sheltered and intimate dining room (37) (Fig. 5.10).
Larger houses also consistently display richer decoration in their dining areas. Owners
lavishly decorated dining room interiors with mosaic and opus sectile on the floors, and
commissioned large and high-quality paintings of mythological scenes on the walls. Large
houses used water not only for practical purposes, but for reasons of display, in fountains and
pools that were usually in direct sight of a dining area, sometimes in concert with sculptural
displays. 13 Smaller houses were limited to cocciopesto floors and small-scale painted subjects on
the inside, and garden vegetation on the outside.
In all homes, cooking areas were ill-lit and hardly decorated, but were put usually in
close proximity to water sources, drainage outlets (such as latrines), and baths (in larger houses).
A reliable water supply was essential to cooking operations. Cisterns are present in all buildings
but the (work)shops, which lacked internal courts with roofs for collecting water and
consequently relied (at least in the imperial period) on the numerous public street fountains.
In (work)shops, a few rooms sufficed for mercantile activity, living (i.e. cooking, eating
and sleeping) and storage. In most smaller buildings, formal business and domestic supplies
were all channeled through a single door, and pots and pans are often found at the cooking site.
In the largest houses, secondary entrances near kitchens or servants' quarters allowed large
amounts of supplies to be moved in and waste material moved out, without disturbing the
patron's business in the atrium. Foodstuffs and cooking utensils were not often stored in the
kitchen proper, but kept in chests and cabinets along the walls of the atrium, in separate
storerooms, or simply piled in various corners of the house.
No regular pattern emerges in the location of fixed cooking areas; they appear at the
front, middle and back of houses of all sizes. This variety corresponds well with the cooking in
vestibulo, in atrio and in postico reported in the literary sources. 14 The location of braziers in atria
12 For arrays of dining areas built for use in specific seasons, see chapter two, pp. 99-105.
13 I.4.5+25, peristyle (17) and I.7.10-12, garden (23) have water and sculptural displays.
14 See chapter two, pp. 69-74.
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