Room 2

Mats Holmlund

Room 2 is approximately 13 square meters large and most likely served as a workshop for the shop in room 1. It is rectangular and entered through a circa 1.00 m wide door in the southwest corner.

The walls of the room are largely intact and for the most part built in opus incertum. The exceptions is a latrine in the southeast corner on the upper floor that is built in opus listatum, a small opening at the bottom of the south wall built in opus testaceum, and a part of the doorpost of the west wall, built in opus quadratum.
There are a couple of larger areas with extant wall plaster on the south and east wall. However, only subsurface plaster remains in these areas.
Parts of or maybe even the entire floor of the room remains, but since the eastern parts of the floor has collapsed into a cesspit or pozzo nero below it, only a small part of the floor in the southwest and northwest corners of the room has been examined. These examined parts were made of some kind of lava pesta.

The most striking feature of the room is the latrine. It measures 0.49 by 1.17 m and is connected to a terracotta pipe, built into the wall, and leading to the pozzo nero below the floor. The small testaceum-opening in the wall (connected to a similar latrine in room 3 of taberna V 1,31) also debouch into the pozzo nero.
In the upper floor east wall, there is a door leading into room 5 of Casa V 1,3. The doorway is circa 1.00 m wide.

There is an upper floor of the room, but there are no remnants or signs of a staircase, which makes it difficult to determine whether or not the upper floor belonged to taberna V 1,30. Since there are no signs of a staircase in room 1, the upper floor of room 1 and room 2 either formed a single room or was connected via a door.