The House of the Tuscan Colonnade is a Roman domus of ancient Herculaneum, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79; it takes its name from the Tuscan columns of the peristyle. It was built in the second century BC, at the end of Samnite rule, and enlarged in the imperial age, when a small dwelling was added to it and the peristyle and upper floor were built.
What to see
The house is the result of successive enlargements, recognisable from the building techniques: opus incertum in the oldest rooms, reticulatum and vittatum in the intermediate ones, brick in the most recent. The main entrance is on the decumanus maximus, opposite the forum and the Basilica, between two shops that were originally bedrooms of the house. The Tuscan atrium has a tuff impluvium clad in marble after the earthquake of 62, when it became a fountain fed by a lead pipe, and two floors laid one above the other eight centimetres apart; one of its walls is among the best-preserved examples of opus incertum in Herculaneum, with tuff, pumice, lava and pebbles. The oecus has Third Style frescoes with a still life, a seated Maenad with a young Pan and two women in conversation. The tablinum, on axis with the atrium, has a frieze with vases, sea creatures and masks, among them Oceanus, and in the mezzanine above it a round slate table with a marble foot was found.
The Augustan peristyle has Tuscan brick columns almost two and a half metres high, covered in stucco, and along the architrave there were antefixes with the head of Medusa, fifteen of which have been found; around it open bedrooms with geometric mosaics and Fourth Style paintings of peacocks, deer and swans. Twenty-two amphorae were found in a corridor with a mezzanine, and in the kitchen there is a lararium decorated with snakes' heads. After the earthquake of 62 the upper floor was divided into four apartments with separate entrances. The house belonged to the Marii, a family of decurions, and then to the freedman Marcus Cornelius Fructus, whose seal was found together with gold coins worth fourteen hundred sesterces.
Visiting
Explored through tunnels in the Bourbon period, the house was excavated in the open by Amedeo Maiuri from 1939 and systematically between 1960 and 1961. It is part of the archaeological area: opening hours and tickets should be checked with the Herculaneum Archaeological Park.
Our editors' tip
Look at the south wall of the oecus: during the eruption a horizontal crack opened in it and the upper masonry slid some twenty centimetres over the lower, a shift that prevented the collapse of the room and of the rooms on the floor above.
