HOUSE OF THE SILVER WEDDING - POMPEII

This house was named in honour of the Italian royal couple, Umberto and Margherita of Savoy, on the occasion of their silver wedding anniversary in 1893, the same year in which the house was discovered. It is located in the last side street off Via Vesuvio, next to an area which has yet to be excavated. It was built in the 2nd century B.C. and is distinguished by its high atrium with four large column which support the roof and its bedroom where the sunlight was filtered by means of veils. There are two gardens. The first is in line with the atrium and has its own private bath-house and open-air swimming pool, a large kitchen and garden and an elegant living room. The latter was decorated with a mosaic floor and a second style paintings and has four octagonal imitation porphyry columns supporting a barrel-vaulted ceiling. The ceiling of the peristyle is higher on the side which receives most sunlight in order to provide a particularly pleasant area to sit on winter days. The second garden, which is much larger and completely surrounded by a wall, has a pool in the centre and an outdoor triclinium.

 

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A painting in the entrance, now in the Archaeological Museum in Naples, of the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, sons of Jupiter and Leda, gives the house its name. This is one of the rare examples in Pompeii of a house with a Corinthian atrium, where the atrium with a central impluvium is surrounded by columns, in this case twelve columns in tufo (the other two alternatives were the Tuscan atrium without columns and the tetrastyle atrium with four columns at the corners of the impluvium). Wall paintings with pictures of mythological subjects were frescoed on the walls of the rooms on either side of the tablinum. Most of them have been detached and are now in the Archaeo ... continue

(Apic. 7, 13, 1) Ingredients:

• 200g fresh or dried dates
• 50g coarsely ground nuts or stone-pine kernels
• a little bit of salt
• honey, or red wine with honey (to stew)
• ground pepper

Instructions:
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Take the stones out of the dates and fill them with nuts or stone-pine kernels and ground pepper. Sprinkle a bit of salt on the filled dates and stew them in honey or honey-sweetened red wine. The dates have to be cooked in on low heat until their paring starts to come off (approximately 5-10 minutes).

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.