GENERAL COMMENTS

The Decorations have so Far Been Considered house by house because their main interest lies in what they tell us about the residential units for which they were designed and the householders who commissioned them. We may conclude, however, by looking at them globally to draw some general conclusions about patterns of distribution and about the contribution made by Insula I.10 to our knowledge of Pompeian interior decoration. The nature of our study, covering a whole insula rather than focusing on individual houses, provides an exceptional opportunity to consider decorations across a range of properties which together constitute a ‘neighbourhood’ within Pompeii. We can thus pick out some of the patterns of economic and social differentiation within a small area of the city. Even if few of our conclusions prove to be unexpected, they none the less provide some kind of model against which to measure the results of studies of individual houses or of whole insulae elsewhere in Pompeii. Our discussion will, inevitably, concentrate on the seven more substantial dwellings in the insula, namely the Case del Menandro, degli Amanti and del Fabbro, and houses 1, 3, 8, and 18. The various one- or tworoom units, including independent shops and workshops, and the upstairs apartment entered via entrance 5, either lacked any form of interior decoration (other than largely plain plaster and mortar paving) or have yielded too little evidence to enable worthwhile conclusions to be drawn. one in the Casa del Fabbro and one in the Casa degli Amanti, hints at the former existence of even more luxurious paintings of which no trace remains. But the record is simply too defective to bring this material into the equation: as in other parts of Pompeii, details of arrangements on the upper floors are mostly unrecoverable. We are forced to base our figures on the ground floors alone, acknowledging the danger that this may result in some distortion of the picture. First, pavements. The decorated paving can be divided into three main types: true mosaic, pavements of mortar sprinkled with pieces of white and coloured stones, and pavements of mortar with patterns formed by lines of tesserae.