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The peristyle gardens in the Campanian towns destroyed by the Vesuvius

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

PERISTYLE GARDENS AND THE CAMPANIAN TOWNS DESTROYED BY THE VESUVIAN ERUPTION
Little can now be found of the famous Roman “Horti”: some ruins, some nymphaea and statues found in the excavations, beautiful works of art but taken away from their context and set in museums. Luckily in the towns destroyed by the Vesuvian eruption lot of gardens have been found. Here the houses are obviously more modest and as a consequence the gardens are not so grand. Nearly always they were grown in the limited space of a peristyle. As a matter of fact they were the peristyle gardens so typical of the Italic civilization, also if some scholars, and among them the French archaeologist Grimal, believed that they were Greek or, at least, Hellenistic. We must observe that prior to the Romans arrival in Greece or in the Middle East, none was there found.
Thus the peristyle garden was an Italic creation. Probably it was the transformation of the ancient Italic orchard, a little plot of land that in ancient times, when the houses consisted of few rooms set around the atrium, was found at their back. With the progressive enrichment of the citizens and the appearance of bigger houses with more apartments, little by little the orchards changed in a garden surrounded by porticos. In this period the atrium, that up to then had been the centre of all activities, was only reserved to the first contact with people coming to visit the owners. It was part of the place where, in front of the strongbox that paraded the master of the house wealth, business were treated sitting in the adjacent “tablinus”, the Roman reception room. Often here there was a large window through which one could see the luscious green of the plants growing in the peristyle garden and, among their foliage, the shining white of marble statues. Nearly always those sculptures were copy of Hellenistic ones: young children with their round and sweet limbs, fauns with their swift and sudden movements, seductive Venuses whose saucy curves were spied by brazen Satyrs and Priapi both represented with a really too strong realism.
The inhabitants of the house often spent their time strolling in the portico. Around them they heard the buzzing of the insects flying from one flower to another, while water gushing from the fountains filled the air with those sprays, that cooled the torrid summer air, a system strongly recommended by Vitruvius. The slightly disheveled look of the plants, the love for nature left free, at least as much as it was possible in this restricted space, gave to the bystander a sense of peaceful quiet and pleasure. Flowers as the bushes of flowering oleander and of triumphant roses grew in the garden and, at the feet of red pomegranates, thrived tufts of violets and irises. It was evident that here all the small trees and bushes had been planted not to follow some preordained design but to comply the master of the house tastes, and, some time also for their fruits. And it was for these fruits that at the centre of many Pompeian peristyle garden cherry-trees roots were found and more often traces of fig-trees and vine. Even a very rare lemon-tree was discovered in Iulius Polibius’s house.
Water was always present in the Campanian gardens and not only for the cooling sprays. Often there was some small canals that crossed the peristyle or ran along the terrace of the most important houses of the area. After the creation of the aqueduct there was water in them; just a little some time, it is true, but to this small quantity all the houses, even the poorest courtyard, could not renounce. Euripi, small fountains, and even smaller basins, with, in their middle, a feeble spout, were found everywhere, and everywhere the silvery liquid sang and gurgled. Often in the wealthiest houses the nymphaea were fitted for dining with water as a background. In the very elegant triclinium of the Iulia Felix’s Praedium at the back of the diners a small fall glided over a flight of white marble steps and water babbled everywhere. Also in others summer, open air and more modest triclinia the masonry stand set amid the tricliniar couches had often at its centre the nozzle of a little fountain that, when people was not dining, was left to gaily gush up.
As we have already said, those Campanian gardens, created between the I cent. B.C. and the second half of the I cent A.D., were nearly always of modest proportions. On their back walls, however, the frescoes enlarged them up to the end of the world, They added other more impressive gardens and adorned them with more grand statues. They created oriental paradises full of fierce animals and of decorative birds perched either on the trees’ branches or on architectonic banisters. To sum it up in a Pompeian peristyle a man could even feel as the master of the world an0.d believe to be in a very ample park.
Of course in the area not all the houses were of middle proportions and their gardens were not always modest. There were also some very important residences as the wealthy villas of Stabia or Oplontis. Their gardens were of the luxurious kind, a normal thing as the families who owned those palaces belonged to those times’ high aristocracy. The most beautiful of those gardens was the one of Oplontis , a villa that was said to have belonged to Poppea’s family. In Neronian times it was increased with additions of grand and magnificent refinements among which notable was the arrangement of the part near the immense swimming pool. On one side of this water sheet marble statues stood at the feet of a row of plane trees. On the other side, in a grand portico splendidly frescoed exedrae alternated to small gardens enclosed by low masonry walls. Among the foliage of the plants grown in these spaces one could see the frescoes created as their background, attractive paintings set on a golden and sunny surface and in them one could see even more luscious plant depicted around marble fountains. How could us refrain to let our fantasy fly high and think of Flavius and Celer, the Domus Aurea architects, and how could we accept that they had nothing to do with this gorgeous decoration?

Bibliography

Scientific popularization
E.SALZA PRINA RICOTTI , Dossier: I giardini nell'antichità in Archeo nº 69, November, pp. 50-97