On 7 April 1848, workmen digging in what is now Rome’s Via Cavour unearthed a modest Roman house. Its walls, however, held something remarkable: a sequence of frescoes illustrating scenes from Homer’s Odyssey. These are among the earliest known Roman wall paintings with a clear narrative from Greek epic literature, a taste for which became fashionable among wealthy Romans as their republic absorbed Hellenic culture.
The domus itself was a typical urban residence of its time, arranged around a central atrium. The paintings, executed in the so-called First Style of Roman wall decoration, imitate coloured marble panels but here also carry the story of Odysseus’s wanderings. The choice of Homeric subject matter hints at the owner’s pretensions to learning and cosmopolitan taste.
Today, the house is gone, but the frescoes survive, fragments of a lost world where a Roman householder could, each day, step from his atrium into the landscapes of myth. The site remains a quiet footnote in the archaeology of the city, a reminder that even the most ordinary Roman street might conceal extraordinary art.
Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.
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