The furniture of a room assigned to slaves has been found in the Roman villa of Civita Giuliana, about 600 meters from the walls of ancient Pompeii. It looks like a photograph, denouncing a situation of precariousness and subalternity. However, it is an image from almost 2,000 years ago, made with the technique of casts, existing only in and around Pompeii. Furniture and textiles, as well as bodies of victims of the 79 A.D. eruption, were covered by the pyroclastic cloud, which then became solid ground while decomposed organic matter left a void in the ground: an imprint that, when filled with plaster, revealed its original form. The new room, named "room "A", looks different from the one formerly known as “room C" reconstructed in November 2021 in which three cots were placed and which served as a storage room at the same time. What has now emerged suggests a definite hierarchy within the servants' quarters. While one of the two beds found in recent weeks is of the same workmanship, extremely simple and without a mattress, as the one from 2021, the other is of a more comfortable and expensive type, known in the bibliography as a "bedstead bed". Traces of red-colored decoration are still visible in the cinerite on two of the backs. In addition to the two beds, there are two small cabinets in the recently excavated room, also partially preserved as casts, a number of ceramic amphorae and vessels, and several tools, including an iron hoe. The micro-excavation of vessels and amphorae from “room C" has meanwhile revealed the presence of at least three rodents: two small mice in an amphora and a rat in a jug, placed under one of the beds and from which the animal apparently tried to escape when it died in the pyroclastic flow of the eruption. Such details again underscore the precarious and unhygienic conditions in which the last of the society of the time lived. The archaeological exploration of the Civita Giuliana villa, which had already been excavated in 1907-1908, began in 2017 based on a collaboration between the Pompeii Archaeological Park, as the body responsible for the protection of the area surrounding the ancient city, and the Torre Annunziata Public Prosecutor's Office, which together with the Carabinieri had uncovered a longstanding clandestine excavation activity in the area of the Villa, which was later broken up and prosecuted both criminally and civilly.
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