Lararium Domus

Following a chance discovery made in the historic center in 2001 in the basement of Palazzo Giampè, excavations were carried out that brought to light the remains of a Roman domus (house) dating from sometime between the second half of the 1st century BC and the first decades of the 1st century AD.

Part of the excavations continued inside a restaurant in the basement of the neighboring Palazzo del Cardinale, where large mosaics with tessellated geometric decorations were found in the domus’s atrium and triclinium. The house thus discovered occupies a total of 400 m2 and currently consists of 13 rooms and a peristyle.
What is unique about the rooms found under Palazzo Giampè is that they have preserved the wall height of over 4 meters high, with the fresco still intact. The decoration, in a canonical third Pompeian style and in vivid colors such as yellow ochre and the famous “Pompeian red”, features: scenes of daily life portrayed in small squares called pinakés; graceful architectural structures; and Egyptian-inspired elements such as winged sphinxes.

In the first of the rooms that can be visited there is a fine geometric floral mosaic made with very small black and white tesserae. In this room a particular terracotta artifact was found, the lararium, from which the domus took its name. It is a small domestic temple dedicated to the Lares deities, guardians of the home and family, with a sculpted sylvan god inside, on exhibit in the National Archeological Museum of  Perugia.