LAUNDRY OF STEPHANUS - POMPEII

This is the only building in Pompeii which was originally built as a laundry and fuller’s workshop; the three other establishments of this kind were restructured residential buildings. The fuller’s workshop provided services to numerous clothiers, wool makers and tailors working in the town. According to the electoral slogans painted on the façade (“the united fullers recommend… Stephanus recommends’), the establishment has been attributed to a certain Stephanus. A press used to fold cloth was placed against the left wall of the large entrance hall. Past the entrance hall, we enter an atrium with a flat roof which served as a terrace to hang out the washing. Finer cloth was washed in the large parapeted tank in the middle of the atrium. The peristyle at the rear of the atrium has three intercommunicating stone tubs and, alongside these, five basins where cloth was trodden by foot. A number of vessels containing urine were found nearby. Urine was used to treat the cloth and was collected in terra-cotta amphorae which were stored in separate rooms not far from the workshop itself. The kitchen and a lavatory are reached through a door in the left-hand corner of the peristyle.

 

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We know for certain that this temple was consecrated to Apollo thanks to the dedication in Oscan by quaestor Oppius Campanus that was found in the cell. One enters the scared area from Via Marina through a tuff portal from the Samnite period. Interestingly, the view of this sacred building is blocked by the central column of the portico’s short side, which suggests that the main entrance was once directly from the Forum. This hypothesis is confirmed by the fact the main facade of the altar at the bottom of the temple steps faces the Forum. The sacred area is surrounded by a portico with 48 Doric columns, in the centre of which, on a podium in the Italic style, is the a ... continue

(Apic. 4, 2, 36) Ingredients:

• 1 kg. nettles
• 11 gr. pepper
• 8 tbsp di liquamen (or soya sauce)
• 9 tbsp olive oil
• 8 eggs

Instructions:
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Wash, drain, dry and mince the nettle. Grind the peppercorns with a pestle and add a tbsp of liquamen; then put all in a pot with oil and liquamen and boil. Make cold and add beaten eggs; mesh. Cook in a bain-marie in oven 130° for 75-80 minutes. Sprinkle with pepper and serve, hot or cold.

Love was a common topic of conversation in Pompeii. Feelings, passions, poetic love, sex, homosexuality, prostitution and so forth were all part of daily life and not a source of prejudice. The concept of “obscenity” seems to have been unknown. Love and sex were considered earthly practices of a man’s life that were encouraged by the benevolence of Venus. The thousands of examples of graffiti found on the town’s walls are unequivocal proof of what the people of Pompeii thought about love and sex.