Domus Romana

Plan of a typical Roman – Pompeian house

Roman domus
The typical Roman domus, as witnessed by the excavations of Pompeii, was a combination of the ancient Italic domus and the Greek house.. In Pompeii it is possible to reconstruct four centuries of development of the private house, starting from the Samnite age, when the houses comprised only the atrium around which the rooms were arranged, passing through the period of the social wars, with the construction of real buildings with a double system, one representative and one private.

The Roman house could be of two types: the domus and the insula. The architectural structure of the domus, a private urban mansion that was different from the villa suburbana, which was a private mansion located outside the city walls, and from the villa rustica, located in the countryside and equipped with specific rooms for agricultural work, requires that it be made up of walls without any windows towards the outside.
Interior architectural elements

The domus developed horizontally and was made up of many rooms with different functions: the bipartite entrance into vestibulum and fauces (from which one accessed theatrium, which was the central room immediately after the entrance, from which one could access the other rooms that overlooked it), the bedrooms called cubicula, the banquet hall called oecus tricliniare or triclinium (where guests could eat lying on the triclinium beds), some lateral rooms called alae, tablinum (room used as a sitting room or study, usually located at the end of the atrium).
External architectural elements
The rooms that directly overlooked the street were usually rented to third parties to be used as shops or artisan workshops and were called tabernae.
In the back of the house there was an open air the garden, the home garden/vegetable garden.

The most prestigious domus were larger and were composed of two main parts: the first gravitated around the atrium, the second around the peristyle, a large porticoed garden overlooking other rooms, usually decorated with fruit trees, water features and small pools. They had the balneum, the bathroom, which was an exact copy of the thermal baths (in fact it included theapodyterium, the locker room, the calidarium, the hot water pool, the tepidarium, warm water pool, to get to the frigidarium which was the swimming pool with cold water). In some richer villas you could also find the bibliotheca, diatheta, a pavilion to entertain guests and the solarium, a terrace that could also be covered.

Generally the noble domus did not have windows to the outside, or, if there were, they were very small. The lighting was provided by the sunlight that entered from the compluvium of the atrium and reflected the adjacent rooms. From the compluvium, in addition to the light, also the rainwater entered and was collected in a quadrangular basin or cistern in the center of the atrium called impluvium.