Chapter X - House of the Fountain

Adjoining the north wall of the fullonica is a house, not particular from its dimensions, but adorned with a fountain of so remarkable a structure, that the habitation was distinguished, for some time, by no other name. There is, however, the name of Holconius Priscus near the door, who was, probably, the protector of the proprietor.

An angle, in size nearly equal to one quarter of the whole quadrangle occupied by this house, has been cut off so as to form a small habitation, consisting only of two little rooms, an entrance, and a peristyle of three columns on each side, and uniting, by means of a narrow door, with the fullonica.

The columns are placed round a compluvium, at one extremity of which seem to have been more than the usual inventions for water-works ; and certain dwarf walls are observed, the uses of which are by no means apparent. Vide plan, plate LX.

The house of the fountain is approached from the street of the Mercuries by a handsome and lofty door ; and the atrium is not less than fifty feet in length, by forty broad. This atrium has its ala on each side, regularly disposed, with its tablinum in the centre ; and, beyond it, a portico with a small court, the wall of which is painted to represent a garden. In the tablinum is a pretty painting of goats.

The whole ground floor of the house consists of eleven rooms, without reckoning the alae, the atrium, or the portico, and it seems to have been the property of a person of consideration.

The ornaments, on the whole, do not differ much in style from those already mentioned. The inner portico has only three columns, and those of a degraded Corinthian ; nor are they at equal distances from what may be termed their antae. The fountain also, though nearly in the middle of the garden, which is not rectangular, is neither placed opposite an intercolumniation, nor opposite the centre of the tablinum, so that it must have lost much of its effect.

Of the wall of the garden, more will be said in the description of the view of it in plate LIII.

The colours and the plaster have long since fallen.

There was a private entrance through the faux, and a back passage from the vicus of the Tragic Poet. Near the faux was also the staircase for ascending to the upper floor.

In this house is the representation of a comic scene, given in plate LIV.

The fountain itself was, however, the great source of the modern celebrity of this habitation, presenting, in fact, several circumstances calculated to strike an observer. First its form, as will be seen by reference to plate LIII, is precisely that which every citizen would erect as a fountain at the bottom of his garden, near the metropolis, in our own times, and such as may be seen, at the present day, in the courts of most of the palaces in Rome and throughout Italy, and proving that, the worse the taste, the better chance it has of being handed down for imitation from generation to generation.

Secondly, the materials are of a singular description, the whole being covered or incrusted with a sort of mosaic, consisting of vitrified tesserae of different colours, but in which blue predominates. These are sometimes arranged in not inelegant patterns, and the grand divisions, as well as the borders, are entirely formed by, and ornamented with, real sea-shells, neither calcined by the heat of the eruption, nor changed by the lapse of so many centuries.