An Ancient Restaurant: the Thermopolium at Ostica

One of the best preserved buildings in Ostica is known as The House of the Wine Bar. This building was near the forum, a prime location for a business of this kind.

When you're dealing with archaeology in Italy, you sometimes have to look a long way back: this structure was excvated in 1802 to 1804. These days, the homes of the people who did this excavation would themselves be archaeological sites. The house was re-investigated in 1914-1915, resulting in a thick report, from which this reconstruction of the building comes. The height was estimated from the thickness of the walls and the amount of rubble, and it is likely correct, although of course not certain. The building was constructed between 100 and 150 AD, but it was very much modified over the three centuries of its occupation.

Plan. The restaurant/wine bar/thermopolium is rooms 5, 6, and 7. Room 13 was a small courtyard that was probably also used by patrons. The staircase you can see adjacent to the courtyard led down to a small underground room, once elaborately painted, that was probably a cult shrine. The space labeled 4 was a staircase leading directly from the street to apartments upstairs, which you can also see in the reconstruction of the facade. Rooms 1 and 2 were shops as were rooms 21 to 25 along the back of the structure.

View inside the Thermopolium, which means an establishment serving hot food. To the left is the counter where the food and drink were served. Most likely patrons did not sit at the counter, since the benches were all around the edges of the rooms, or in the courtyard. To the right is the built-in stove.

More views of the counter. The marble on the top, installed around 300 AD, is reused from some older building, and one of the pieces has an inscription likely a century old when the counter was built. Some of the fragmentary paintings depict food, but there is much disagreement of what food; eggs and olives seem to be the only things everyone agrees on. A large jar set into the floor almost certainly held wine.

The courtyard.

Surviving bits of decoration. The whole establishment was once plastered and painted, and the floor covered with mosaics. And this was not a restaurant for the elite, but for for people several steps down the social ladder. Not the poor, but not senators, either.

Truly a remarkable thing to survive.