A room used by slaves, with adjustable beds, has been excavated by archaeologists in Civita Giuliana , a suburban village north of Pompeii that has been studied since 2017.
In fact, inside the room, where three wooden beds have been found, a wooden chest was discovered containing metal and cloth objects, which appear to be parts of horse harnesses.
City preserved in amber
Founded in the 7th century BC, Pompeii was well known as a vacation spot for the wealthiest and most powerful of the time . One peaceful afternoon like any other, that of August 24, 79, a distant thunder was heard and the ground began to shake. The Vesuvius volcano was erupting, spitting out the bowels of the earth at just over a thousand degrees Celsius.
In just a few hours, everything had been covered in ash to a height of twenty feet. That pyroplastic flow plunged Pompeii into oblivion for centuries. It was a tragedy but, on the other hand, that process preserved the city like an insect preserved in amber . A city stopped in time, enclosed in a bibelot, until, in 1748, excavations began in the area and the natural museum that lay there was discovered, although the city was not identified as such until much later, in 1763.
Among the buildings, the fossilized corpses and others, what was also discovered was the graffiti on the walls of the interior and exterior of the houses. Now we can also add this room with beds made of several roughly worked wooden boards that can be adjusted according to the height of the user. While two of them are around 1.7 meters long, one bed is only 1.4 meters long and therefore may have belonged to a young man or a boy.
Various personal items have also been found under the beds, including amphoras placed to store private belongings, ceramic jugs and a "chamber pot". The room was lit by a small upper window and shows no evidence of wall decorations .
The excavation of the room is part of the works that the Pompeii Archaeological Park is carrying out together with the Torre Annunziata Prosecutor’s Office, directed by the Attorney General Nunzio Fragliasso.
