House of the Faun, Pompeii

At almost 3,000 square metres, the House of the Faun (Casa del Fauno) is the largest known private house in ancient Pompeii. It takes up nearly a whole city block – insula 12 of Regio VI – on the Via di Nola. It was built at the beginning of the 2nd century BC, still in the Samnite period, and generously remodelled by the end of that century: the older atrium house gained two colonnaded courtyards, an Ionic and a Doric peristyle.

Who owned the house is not certain. An inscription with the cognomen Saturninus points to the Satria family, a ring bearing the name Cassius to a family that married into it. The eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 buried the house, and the ash preserved its decoration. It was excavated between 1830 and 1832.

The house is named after a small bronze statue of a dancing faun found on 26 October 1830 by the atrium’s water basin. On 24 October 1831 the Alexander Mosaic came to light in the floor of an exedra: it measures 5.82 by 3.13 metres, consists of around one million tesserae and shows Alexander the Great in battle against the Persian king Darius III. The statue and the mosaic are now on display in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples; copies stand in the house itself. At the entrance a mosaic greets visitors with the word “HAVE” – “Hail to you”.