Room u

Thomas Staub

This narrow space (0.6 m wide, 3.3 â€" 3.4 m long) is in its present state difficult to interpret. It has the appearance of a corridor with a dead end, e.g. ending in the closed north wall. It could either have served as a staircase for an upper floor above the north-western part of the house, but there are no indications or remains of either stairs or an upper floor in the last stage of the life span of the house. It would also be unusual, that the area beneath a hypothetical staircase had been left unaccessible. Normally such areas could be entered from another room and used for storage. (See for example the situaton in V 1,7, Casa del Torello, room/staicase 12, entered as staircase from the peristyle and as storage from room a.) Another possible function could have been as a storage room. The walls are mainly constructed in a mixedOpus incertum, in the north wall predominantly lava and also quite a few spolias of a cocciopesto pavement.
Observations on the north wall in room x just west of the probably slightly wrongly reconstructed east wall of room u shows a horizontal layer of plaster running into the wall, similar as it can be seen from the outside (Vicolo delle Nozze d'argento). From there also a row of standing sarno-stone blocks can be observed approx. 1 m further to the east. Thus a plausible interpretation would be that it originally was doorway, later blocked of. The masurements of the threshold now in V 1,12 and inserted at a second stage in the history of the house, would fit nicely. A masoned postament (0.21 m deep, 0.24 m high) is situated 0.84 m inside the blocked doorway. This could be interpreted as the foundation for a staircase leading to an upper floor, thus a separate upper floor apartment, that later was substituted by entrance V 1,12 (See Staub Gierow 2008 on the hypothesis, that this entrance was a secondary element). But since the east wall of this narrow corridor seems to be a later instalement (built against the plaster on the north wall of room v), it is more plausible, that it was a doorway towards a smaller entity on the ground floor.
Another element belonging to an earlier construction phase are remains of torn down wall made of lava-incertum, running in east-west direction whose continuation could also be observed in room x. Thus it seems plausible, that at this part of the house (rooms u, v, v', x, m, p at least partly made up a separate entity.