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Tabernae were ubiquitous in all Roman cities, lining the busiest streets and dominating their most crowded intersections. This volume focuses on food and drink outlets in particular, combining analysis of both archaeological material and textual sources to offer a thorough investigation into the social and economic worlds of the Roman shop.
This book explores the manner in which architectural settings and action contexts influenced the perception of decoration in the Roman world. Crucial to the relationship between ancient viewers and media was the concept of decor, a term employed by Vitruvius and other Roman authors to describe the appropriateness of particular decorative elements to the environment in which they were located. The papers in this volume examine a diverse range of decorated spaces, from press rooms to synagogues, through the lens of decor. In doing so, they shed new light on the decorative principles employed across Roman Italy and beyond.
This volume focuses on the socio-spatial organisation of ancient cities, and more specifically on Late Republican and Imperial Italy. Referring to a praxeological and phenomenological perspective, it looks at neighbourhoods and city quarters as basic categories of design and experience.
Privacy is a widely debated concept today, and a paramount concern for modern societies: the ideas and prerogatives that it encapsulates are considered, nowadays, to be essential human rights and key issues when defining the mutual relationship between the individual and society at large. In order to investigate the boundaries and nuances of privacy in the Roman society, the city of Pompeii provides a rare case in point, due to the extraordinary concentration and readability of contextual archaeological data. The aim of this volume which originated from an International Workshop held at the Center for Advanced Studies of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, is to contribute to a better knowledge of the domestic space in Pompeii and other cities of the Roman world as mirrored by the interplay between individual and social spaces. To this purpose, a small group of researchers from a variety of backgrounds and traditions have been invited to contribute papers on different aspects of privacy, emphasizing diversity in methodologies and approaches.
The focus of this volume is on the aesthetics, semantics and function of materials in Roman antiquity between the 2nd century B.C. and the 2nd century A.D. It includes contributions on both architectural spaces (and their material design) and objects – types of 'artefacts' that differ greatly in the way they were used, perceived and loaded with cultural significance. With respect to architecture, the analysis of material aesthetics leads to a new understanding of the performance, imitation and transformation of surfaces, including the social meaning of such strategies. In the case of objects, surface treatments are equally important. However, object form (a specific design category), which can enter into tension with materiality, comes into particular focus. Only when materials are shaped do their various qualities emerge, and these qualities are, to a greater or lesser extent, transferred to objects. With a focus primarily on Roman Italy, the papers in this volume underscore the importance of material design and highlight the awareness of this matter in the ancient world.
A groundbreaking ecocritical study that examines how ideas about the natural and built environment informed architectural and decorative trends of the Roman Late Republican and Early Imperial periods. Landscape emerged as a significant theme in the Roman Late Republican and Early Imperial periods. Writers described landscape in texts and treatises, its qualities were praised and sought out in everyday life, and contemporary perceptions of the natural and built environment, as well as ideas about nature and art, were intertwined with architectural and decorative trends. This illustrated volume examines how representations of real and depicted landscapes, and the merging of both in visual spac...
The Near East during the Hellenistic and Roman periods has been studied for centuries. This Handbook includes fifty chapters written by experts from a variety of disciplines: archaeology (including classical, near eastern, and Islamic), ancient history, anthropology, art history, data and network science, epigraphy, and historiography. Together, these chapters shed a fresh light on the vast regions that made up Hellenistic and later Roman Syria and the Near East. The material and written evidence from the region is considered side-by-side with historical sources as well as scientific data coming out of archaeological science and network science, and shows how new knowledge about the region c...
Classicists have long wondered what everyday life was like in ancient Greece and Rome. How, for example, did the slaves, visitors, inhabitants or owners experience the same home differently? And how did owners manipulate the spaces of their homes to demonstrate control or social hierarchy? To answer these questions, Hannah Platts draws on a diverse range of evidence and an innovative amalgamation of methodological approaches to explore multisensory experience – auditory, olfactory, tactile, gustatory and visual – in domestic environments in Rome, Pompeii and Herculaneum for the first time, from the first century BCE to the second century CE. Moving between social registers and locations, from non-elite urban dwellings to lavish country villas, each chapter takes the reader through a different type of room and offers insights into the reasons, emotions and cultural factors behind perception, recording and control of bodily senses in the home, as well as their sociological implications. Multisensory Living in Ancient Rome will appeal to all students and researchers interested in Roman daily life and domestic architecture.
Considerations about size and scale have always played a central role within Greek and Roman visual culture, deeply affecting sculptural production. Both Greeks and Romans, in particular, had a clear notion of “colossality” and were able to fully exploit its implications with sculpture in many different areas of social, cultural and religious life. Instead, despite their ubiquitous presence, an equal and contrary categorization for small size statues does not seem to have existed in Greek and Roman culture, leading one to wonder what were the ancient ways of conceptualizing sculptural representations in a format markedly smaller than “life-size.” Even in the context of modern scholar...
Das vorliegende Buch möchte für den öffentlichen Raum Pompejis diskutieren, wie Gestaltungsstrategien eingesetzt wurden, um bestimmte atmosphärische Effekte zu erzeugen. Im Fokus stehen die letzten Jahrzehnte der Stadt, vor der Zerstörung durch den Vesuv (79 n. Chr.). Für diesen archäologisch besonders gut greifbaren Zeithorizont werden verschiedene Funktionskontexte hinsichtlich ihrer Gestaltungsstrategien, ihrer Handlungsangebote und ihrer atmosphärischen Effekte vergleichend untersucht: Straßen, das Forum und seine angrenzenden Gebäude, die Heiligtümer, Theater, Amphitheater und Thermen, stellvertretend für den kommerziellen Sektor Lebensmittelläden, Imbisse, Bars und Gaststätten sowie das Bordell. Diese Einzelstudien werden in zwei resümierenden Kapiteln zusammengeführt – einerseits in Hinblick auf atmosphärisch relevante Gestaltungsparameter (Raumerlebnis, Oberflächen, Bilder), andererseits in Bezug auf die Erzeugung atmosphärischer Texturen im Stadtraum.