The House of the Bicentenary is a Roman domus of ancient Herculaneum, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. The name recalls that it was excavated two hundred years after the first discoveries at Herculaneum began. Built in the Augustan age, it belonged to an aristocratic family, perhaps the Petronii, as the wax tablets found inside suggest.
What to see
The house faces the decumanus maximus, not far from the forum, and is built in opus reticulatum of yellow tuff over about 560 square metres. The entrance passage is painted with red and white checks. The Tuscan atrium, the largest room, has a black and white mosaic floor with the impluvium at the centre, framed by a braid pattern, and a roof five and a half metres high; the Fourth Style walls have porphyry-red panels and architectural perspectives. In the right wing survives a rare carbonised door, with two sliding leaves folding like a concertina, its slats joined by studs, which protected the valuables on display. The tablinum has Fourth Style paintings on a yellow ground, turned red ochre by the heat of the eruption, with Daedalus and Pasiphae and Mars and Venus with cupids at the centre; a monitoring system controls the climate to protect them. Behind the tablinum is the peristyle, where remains of a rose garden were found.
After the earthquake of 62 the upper floor was divided into two rented apartments, with frescoed walls of opus craticium. In the finest of the painted lararia, two agathodaemon serpents move towards an altar bearing an egg, beneath two dancing Lares. In the same room were found a seal with the name of the freedman Marcus Helvius Erotus, a marble bust, a statue of Venus leaning on a herm of Priapus and a dove-shaped perfume flask; in the next room, three bronze statuettes of Jupiter, Minerva and Mercury. During the first restorations the shape of a cross in the plaster also attracted interest.
Visiting
Excavated by Amedeo Maiuri between 1937 and 1939 and opened to the public in 1939, the house was closed in 1983 because of collapses and stability problems. From 2010 restoration carried out with the Packard Foundation, the Herculaneum Conservation Project and the Soprintendenza, later the Archaeological Park, made it safe, and in 2019 it reopened. Opening hours and tickets should be checked with the Herculaneum Archaeological Park.
Our editors' tip
The wax tablets and a papyrus found in one room tell of a lawsuit in the years before the eruption: Calatoria Themis claimed that Petronia Justa was not freeborn, because her mother had not yet been freed when she gave birth. The case went to Rome twice; the final outcome is unknown, but it was probably in Justa's favour.
