Italy Trip Sept 2025 - Part 8 Pompeii (2)

The House of the Vettii

This house was owned by two former slaves, Aulus Vettius Conviva and Aulus Vettius Restitutus, who had somehow made their fortune in the wine trade after becoming Freedmen. It was originally excavated in the late 1800s and wax was painted over the frescoes in an attempt to preserve them, which proved difficult to remove. We were lucky to see this house as it was only opened to tourists in 2023 after two decades of restoration work! It is absolutely full of frescoes and just astonishing. Due to so many photos between K and me I have made this whole post about this house, and will finish off Pompeii in the next post.

There was a model showing the layout of the house which is always useful - there were so many rooms here but many rooms in Roman houses were very small. Every room was painted - different styles in different rooms, just like how we might decorate our houses two thousand years later! Many of the main pictures were of mythological stories and it is the same in all the houses we saw.

Dionysus and Ariadne watching a fight between Eros and Pan.

The room that the above picture is in.

This painting depicts Cyparissus, Apollo's lover, who was turned into a cypress tree after killing Apollo's beloved stag.

A Lararium - a shrine to the gods of the household are found in many Pompeiian households. Here, the lararium imitates the form of a temple. Columns support a pediment, and frame a central painting. Two dancing lares (guardians of the family, who protect the household from external threats) hold raised drinking horns. They are positioned on either side of the genius (who represents the spirit of the male head of the household), who is dressed in a toga and making a sacrifice. Beneath them all is a serpent. Snakes are often depicted in lararia, and were considered guardian spirits of the family. Text taken from this web page.

If you read this text, you will see at the end that it mentions a slave girl selling herself to clients for the sum of two asses (coins).

And this is the room in question with erotic paintings on the wall!

An inscription on a wall refers to a 'Greek woman of pleasant manners' who was paid two copper coins. We couldn't actually enter this room, just look from the doorway, so we didn't see the actual graffiti.

This is the atrium and talking of erotic, I missed completely in this room, because I didn't know at the time that it was there, a picture of the god of fertility, Priapus, with his gigantic penis resting on a weighing scale! Apparently it used to be covered up back in the Victorian times when they were prudish about such things. Erotic art was common in Pompeii however.

Warships in a naval battle.

If you look at the next few pictures larger, you will see several faces peeking over the walls. Not sure what they signify. The main painting is the 'Punishment of Ixion'.

Courtyard with peristyle (pillars with roof over). Still more frescoes!

A different style in this room which is very red with black friezes.

Hercules killing a serpent.

Hope you enjoyed this tour around this incredible house full of amazing works of art! These kind of paintings are not my thing at all; mythological creatures and religious paintings normally bore the pants off me as I'm a nature and landscape art loving person, but to see art like this in situ from nearly 2,000 years ago is just mind blowing!