Home -> Articoli -> Roma - Alimentazione e banchetti

Roma - Ritual Kitchens and triclinia

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

RITUAL KITCHEN IN ANCIENT ROMAN EMPIRE.
In ancient times apart of the kitchens in private houses and pubs there were also other ones connected with special rites. Thus at Ostia there is a mysterious kitchen adjacent to the so called “Sacello a tre navate”, a basilican hall where two very long tricliniar masonry couches run along its lateral naves while at the end of the central one there is a little altar. It is evident that the banquets held here were connected to some special cult and that holy meals were prepared in the nearby kitchen, a room set just near the entrance. Inside it there was a masonry cooking range. It is evident that here the cooking was done on a bed of embers in the ancient traditional way, the one that was certainly present in Campania till the end of the I cent. B.C.. We still find those masonry banks in some Ostienses pubs and inns, but, probably, only to boast their regional cooking. The only other ones found in Latium are always connected with traditional and religious ceremonies.
Another kind of masonry cooking range was found at the Roman Forum in the House of the Vestals’s kitchen. The bed of embers was here built on the surface of a masonry bank so high that to reach its top a little stairway had been built on one side of it. The bed of embers was prepared in a limited sector of its surface, just at its centre where some different flagstones had been inserted in the bank’s flooring. The Vestals crouched around it, just as their ancient ancestress did around their huts’ earths, prepared the sacred foods and the flat cakes necessary for the offerings to the gods.
Then ritual kitchens are also found in the tombs. The ceremonies that took place there, consisted in preparing and offering those ritual repasts called “refrigeria” held at fixed dates by friends of the deceased, funeray banquets that were considered indispensable to the defunct’s survival in the hereafter. As a matter of fact in ancient Rome everybody believed that their existence in the Inferi could only last until ritual meals were offered to them. We must avow that this was scrupulously done by their relatives and on fixed days whole families came around the tombs of their kins and there all of them consumed the dinner. Of course all were sure that also the deceased members of the family participated to the banquet, but they did it only in a spiritual way. For them very little was sufficient, some drop of wine thrown on the ground or some symbolic offer of food: this was what was deemed to suffice and it allowed the defuncts to survive. In some of the necropolis there were not special preparations for those ritual and the family simply crowded around the tomb. In other there were complex arrangements with kitchens, triclinia, pits and some time even basin for rites of purification.
A classical example of such tomb is the “Elephant’s Tomb” found in Spain, near Seville: it is a very large and extremely interesting sepulchral structure. As other tombs of this necropolis it was made excavating in the soil a deep and huge cavity that constituted the central courtyard. On it opened the funerary chamber and a series of rooms connected with the funerary meals that would be offered for the deceased relatives cult. The kitchen of the “Elephant’s Tomb” was set in a little room cut in the rocky subsoil and a stone cooking range stood in it. A nearby pit furnished the water that was poured in a good canals system furnishing the kitchen and also filling a large basin evidently dedicated to the ritual ablutions.
The Carmona tomb had also all the arrangements for the people who would participate to the funerary banquet. Thus, adjacent to the funerary chamber, there was an ample room and here was placed the family triclinium with the tricliniar couches sculpted in the rocks where the tomb had been made. In the courtyard, just in front of it, there were the other appliances made for the family subordinate members as servant, farmers and so on. To sum it up, all the people who lived under the same roof or in the family properties would participate to the funerary banquet. For them there had been arranged stone benches set around two rectangular tables typical when there was no service and all the food was set in front of the diners.
Another tomb of this kind with its kitchen, a tricliniar area and a ritual basin for ablutions has been found at Gargaresc in Libya. From what I know these arrangements are typical of the Neopunic area or at least of all the areas subject to its influence as, for example, was Carmona, belonging to a part of Spain that had strict contacts with the Neopunic civilization. Thus kitchens and funerary triclinia are seen also in the “Isola Sacra” necropolis, an area near the great Ostia’s harbour. Here there was always a lot of traffic with the countries of the North Africa, and the exchange of influence among the two people was intense and the same funerary rituals were held. In this necropolis we find pits and in one of the tombs set in a niche we see also a real kitchen with the surface of its masonry cooking range lined by “coppi” (hollow tiles with a semicircular section) and where cooking was done on a bed of embers. The flooring of thick, big, white tessera of mosaic, the kind normally used for the kitchens and “latrinae”, the thick protection shaped as a circle arch that waterproofed the alcove and the hole cut on the outside wall toward which the slope conveyed the water used to wash the floor are characteristic of Roman kitchens.
In many tombs of this same necropolis we also find proper triclinia for the funerary dinners. They are composed of low tricliniar masonry couches set at the side of the door of the tomb and furnished of a long shelf on which to lay the glasses or the bread when people needed the hands for eating. One of this tomb has two tricliniar couches set at the two sides of the door and it was called a biclinium, term technically exact because two are the couches, that in greek are named “clinai”, and from this came the bi-clinium, but I dissented. As a matter of fact I am persuaded that in reality the couches formed a normal horseshoe triclinium because the tomb is the third couch, the middle one, the place that in ancient Rome was reserved to the most important guests, and it was on this that took their places the deceased members of the family. It was a real triclinium and from their places they dominated it.

Bibliography

Scientific popularization
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Cibi, cucine e triclini in L'alimentazione nel mondo antico. I Romani: etá imperiale, in Archeo, Rome 1987. pp. 70-140

Academic papers
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI - Cucine e quartieri servili in epoca romana in Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia,Vol. LI-LII, (1978-79, 1979-1980), pp. 237-294
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI – Cibi, cucina e banchetti in Vita quotidiana nell’Italia Antica: vita in famiglia. Verona, 1993. Arnaldo Mondadori publisher, pp 111-144.