This is not a rich man's house: perhaps a dozen people lived here, slaves included, and it was made by joining two smaller dwellings. It was excavated between 1896 and 1898 while the prince of Naples, that is the future king Victor Emmanuel the Third, watched the work, and from him it took the name it still carries.
What to see
The rooms are small and tight around the atrium, and the paintings were redone shortly before the eruption, partly after the damage of the earthquake that had struck Pompeii seventeen years earlier. They are decorations of good quality but not luxurious: the house of a family that was doing reasonably well and cared about appearances.
Inside were found a skeleton, food remains and objects of daily use, which means that at the moment of the eruption the house was lived in; and then amphorae and loom weights, the tools of textile work done at home. In the walls there are holes opened by those who came back to dig through the rubble right after the eruption to carry off what they could.
Visiting
The house is in Regio VI, in the northern part of the site; the visit is covered by the Pompeii ticket, but the opening of individual houses changes from day to day: check the map at the gate. A quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
Look for the holes in the walls: they are the trace of looters, not of archaeologists. In the days and months after the eruption people came back to dig into the buried houses to recover furniture, metal and statues. Pompeii was not abandoned all at once, it was emptied piece by piece, and these breaches are the most concrete proof.