House of the Wooden Sacellum — Attraction in Ercolano

"The House of the Wooden Sacellum owes its name to a beautiful cabinet with a wooden lararium in the shape of a small temple with Corinthian capitals, found charred in a cubicle on the ground floor to the right of the entrance. The domus, albeit with minor transformations that occurred over time, retained until its last phase of life the typical appearance of Herculaneum dwellings of the 2nd century BCE. Proof of this is the plan layout of the rooms with the canonical succession of entrance, fauces, atrium, tablinum. In the atrium, traces of an ancient loggia (cenaculum) are even visible, which must have developed over the tablinum and the rooms facing the V Cardo, according to a model that in Herculaneum is well represented by the Casa Sannitica. Inside the lararium were found, among other things, a statuette of Hercules and a seal of Lucius Autronius Euthimion, the last owner of the domus. Today the house appears bare with few remnants of decorations referable to its last phase of life, but in ancient times it must have had some dignity despite its modest plan development. This is confirmed by the beautiful floor of the tablinum, which shows a cocciopesto decorated with geometric motifs obtained through the insertion of white tesserae, datable between the second and first centuries BC. Just at the entrance to this room, an archaeological essay was carried out that allowed the levels below the cocciopesto floor of the atrium to be investigated, leading to the discovery of a brick and masonry channel, oriented East-West, that was used to convey roof waters into the impluvium basin and from there into the cistern below. It was thus part of the rainwater storage system that served the needs of the inhabitants, who could retrieve it by drawing it through the circular inlet on the south side of the basin: an element that would remain active until the last moment of the building’s life and that bears direct witness to the fact that in this domus, unlike many others in Herculaneum, there was no running water when the eruption of 79 AD arrived.“

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