I 10, 7: Casa del Fabbro

Abstract

In its present form the casa del fabbro is an attenuated and relatively cramped property. Not only is the width of its atrium complex so restricted as to allow space for only two narrow cubicula and a small.storeroom on one side, but the space to the east of the fauces has been detached to form part of a separate property (1 10, 6). At the rear, apart from a portico (10) with a kitchen (11) partitioned off at one end of it, there are no rooms beyond the line of the tablinum, merely a small garden enclosed by a blind wall. The full complement of living rooms on the ground floor consists, therefore, if we exclude the atrium (3), of a room occupied by a stair and a latrine (1) and a small cubiculum (2) to the west of the fauces, the two cubicula (4 and 5) and the storeroom (6) to the west of the atrium, the tablinum (7), and two larger rooms flanking it, one of which may have served as a cubiculum (8) and the other as a dining-room (9). The remaining living space was all upstairs. Here the only rooms which can definitely be identified are a series of four or five small chambers above rooms 1-2 and 4-6; but it is probable that there were further rooms above rooms 8 and 9, as well as the tablinum. Whether the house retained an upper floor over the space which had been ceded at its north-east corner, we have no means of telling (cf. p. 145). All this represents a contraction from earlier days, when the house had been interconnected with the Casa del Menandro, and the portico and garden area offered access to the rear (pp. 55, 79-81). That the house had come on harder times, or at least that it had passed into the hands of an owner or tenant with different cultural standards, is suggested by the decorations. The sole remaining fine-quality decorations are those of the late Third Style in rooms 8 and 9: redground wall-paintings with mythological pictures and black-ground ceiling-paintings in the former, and black wall-paintings with mythological landscapes and a painted cocciopesto pavement containing geometric patterns of tesserae in the latter.