Room o

Thomas Staub

Room o opens up in its entire southern side towards peristyle i. A narrow door in the east wall connects the room with room p as well. It could have served as another dining room or another kind of reception room. Most of the walls are still covered by plaster and where this has fallen down shows extensive coatings with modern concrete, so that a more detailed study of the material and techniques used is not possible. But it seems as if the walls are mainly constructed in a mixed opus incertum, only the doorframes are constructed either in opus vittatum mixtum or with smaller cut blocks of mainly Sarno stone.
The floor is made of mosaics in white and black, framing the rectangular central area, decorated with larger, in the four corners round and in the centre-piece rectangular slabs of coloured marble. The walls still show quite well-preserved decorations belonging to the Fourth Style, with black dados and tripartite red middle and upper zones. The three walls (the fourth, the south is taken up by the passage to the peristyle) each showed a central painting with a mythological theme: on the north wall Mars and Venus and on the east wall Ariadne in Naxos. The central painting of the west wall, Danae in Sophiros, was soon after the excavation cut out and taken to the national museum in Naples (Inv.Nr. 111212).