I can’t remember how exactly I found out about the Painted Houses– perhaps it was just on the Ostia Antica website– but I caught wind that on Sundays, you could make reservations (for free!) to see the restored painted houses at Ostia Antica, which are otherwise locked. It was a little sketchy, and it involved sending an email (multiple times, since they didn’t confirm the first two times I tried) to a random Italian government email address. Finally they wrote back with boilerplate instructions in Italian, which I could read thanks to Gmail’s built-in translate function. Technology!
We went into the first house which was amazing only because you could get a true appreciation of what the house looked like– you could see the bathroom (it was a very swanky house!), baths, the central courtyard, and side rooms. It must have been very dark in Roman times, as the rooms didn’t have windows but the hallways, which were half open to the interior courtyard, did. I’m not even going to bother showing you paintings from the first house, because they weren’t as spectacular as what came next.
I think Severin was a little skeptical of the experience at first, because we were with a group of 20 or so people, and the others were a little pushy. The group was mostly Italian, and though there were guides escorting us to the houses and unlocking the doors, they weren’t particularly friendly and didn’t offer any insight into what we were looking at. And even if they did…they spoke zero English and seemed more interested in talking to each other then their charges.
The paintings in the second house were much better, and I think we were both a little more pleased with our decision at that point. Plus, despite having signs clearly indicating no pictures were allowed, the guides let us get up in there and go hogwild with our cameras– no flash, of course.
Inside one of the houses– unfortunately my camera lens is great for low light but not great for wide angle photos, so things are pretty closely cropped:
Floors from the same house– not quite level after nearly two millennia:
It’s easy to think of ancient Rome and ancient Greece as very marble-heavy places, but as I understand it much of the statuary was painted, as were many interior walls. This particular wall painting almost looked like wallpaper, or what we would call a “gallery wall” today. These works have obviously been professionally restored, but enough remnants existed in order for conservationists to save it. Do you think the man who painted it could even fathom that people more than a thousand years in the future would lay eyes on his art? Not to mention that they’d be able to capture exact images of it using personal electronic devices. If you asked me today what would endure of our civilization and be visited by the tourists of the year 4000, I have no idea what it would be. At the rate we’re going, maybe not much. This artist probably thought Rome would last forever; it was so powerful he probably couldn’t even fathom its fall…
