Roman Houses

In Roman architecture, an insula (Latin for “island”, insulae) was one of two things either a kind of apartment building, or a city block. This article deals with the former definition, that of a type of apartment building. Insulae housed most of the urban citizen population of ancient Rome’s massive population ranging from 800,000 to 1 million inhabitants in the early imperial.  Residents of an insula included ordinary people of lower- or middle-class status (the plebeians) and all but the wealthiest from the upper-middle class (the equites). The middle class had normal size poorly built homes looking more like a shed then a house. It held a kitchen 2 beds and bathrooms were built outside in holes or in buckets. The traditional elite and the very wealthy lived in a domus, a large single-family residence, but the two kinds of housing were intermingled in the city and not segregated into separate neighborhoods. notes that insulae, like domus, had running water and sanitation, but this type of housing was sometimes constructed at minimal expense for speculative purposes, resulting in insulae of poor construction. They were built in timber, brick, and later Roman concrete, and were prone to fire and collapse, as described by Juvenal, the Roman satirist. The House of the Faun (Italian: Casa del Fauna), constructed in the 2nd century BC during the Samnite period (180 BC), was a grand Hellenistic palace that was framed by peristyle in Pompeii, Italy. The historical significance in this impressive estate is found in the many great pieces of art that were well preserved from the ash of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. It is one of the most luxurious aristocratic houses from the Roman Republic and reflects this period better than most archaeological evidence found even in Rome itself. The House of the Faun, along with the House of Pansa and the House of the Silver Wedding represent the higher class of the Roman houses of the Republic.