Near Porta Ercolano, at the start of the road leading out of the city, is one of the oldest houses in Pompeii: it was built in the Samnite period, two centuries before the town became Roman, and it is the best example of how people lived here before the fashions of Rome arrived. But the interesting thing happened later: in its last decades the owner turned part of it into a business.
What to see
The plan is the classic atrium house: you enter along a corridor, reach the central hall with its basin for rainwater, and the rooms open around it. It is all in tuff, without marble, with severe proportions: Samnite architecture, that is architecture from before. At the far end, the garden with its portico keeps a fresco of the mythological scene of Actaeon torn apart by his dogs.
On the street front, however, the rooms do not communicate with the house: they are shops with independent entrances, rented out to others, and in one corner of the building a bakery worked, with its oven and millstones. The owner of one of the oldest houses in town had gone into the property business, and that is something written sources rarely record. The building was badly damaged by the bombing of 1943 and rebuilt.
Visiting
The house is in Regio VI, a few steps from Porta Ercolano, along via Consolare; the visit is covered by the site ticket. A quarter of an hour. The opening of individual houses changes: check the map at the gate.
Our editors' tip
Look at the street front before going in: count the doors, and you see there are too many for a single house. Then look for the bakery's millstones in the corner. In ten minutes you grasp that Pompeii was not a town of patrician villas but a place where even the rich rented out the ground floor.