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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
ARROW - 36. Chapter 36
After lunch, we stayed with the group.
The tour leader continued with tours of several houses. The first house was of Venus in a Shell. I looked at Colin, “The house was named after that fresco.” The tourist trade was an important to Pompeii. This house had gardens and porticos that were well maintained as if people still lived here. It was a good representation of the way people lived before the eruption.
Over the next few hours we followed the group to the house of Lorries Tiburtinus. I watched Colin as we viewed the several frescos on the walls. It would seem that the occupants of this city had no problem with nudity. Walking into the lower section there was a statue laying on it’s side. The figure was a hermaphrodite. On my previous trips to Italy, I saw several statues showing hermaphroditis. I always wonder if these people were revered in some way or just created out of curiosity.
The next house our guide led us to was one of the largest houses in Pompeii. It took up 3/4ths of the block of houses. The house in and of itself wasn’t unusual except for size. The internal decorations were typical, paintings of the gods, paintings of women and men which would leave you with the impression they were important to the owner of the house.
The next house was interesting, it was the house of the Chaste Lovers. The name was given to the house based on a wall painting of a banquet which showed two lovers kissing. In one of the bottom rooms, there was an incomplete frieze of a chariot race. Deer were pulling the chariots being driven by cherubs. The guide said the frieze was incomplete because of the eruption. You could see that the frieze was meant to go around the top of the walls.
“Armand, that painting upstairs does not indicate that these lovers were chaste.”
“I think the ladies were still dressed and who ever made that name assumed nothing was going on. Don’t let the names of the houses influence you. Those names were given by the men who excavated the site. If they found something that indicated whose house it was, they would name it, House of xxx. If they didn’t, then they would look for something unique to identify it.”
The next building we saw was a laundry. “They had a laundry in those days? I would have thought the slaves would have done that.”
“If you knew how the laundry was done, you would change your mind. Notice the number of floors as we climb these steps.” There were three floors above the entrance floor. The stairs led to the flat roof. “Here they had vats filled with urine. The clothes were placed in the vats and the people working here would tramp on the clothes with their bear feet.”
“Urine? Why urine? It would stink.”
“Yes, but urine contains ammonia. Even detergents today contain salts of ammonia. When they were finished tramping the clothes they were removed and taken to the floor below. There the clothes were rinsed in clean water. This was repeated on the next two floors until they reached the bottom floor where they were dried and pressed.” We walked down to the main floor, stopping at each floor on the way.
Arriving on the main floor, I showed Colin how the clothes were dried and pressed. One of the men in our party heard me telling Colin about the drying and ironing of the clothes. “Have you taken this tour before?”
“No, but I have been here before. I had a friend who has been here often and I came with him several times.”
“Maybe I should hang out with you. Our guide didn’t want to go up those steps. I saw you coming down. What is up there?”
I let Colin tell him. I could see the disgust on his face as Colin told him about them washing their clothes in urine. I had to walk away to keep from laughing out loud.
I was outside the main door of the business when Colin and our friend caught up with me. The tour group was moving to the next house which I remembered as the bakery.
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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
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