From May 30 to June 24, 2022, a field season of the project “Bathing Culture and the Development
of Urban Space: Case Study Pompeii”, was carried out in the Stabian Baths to clarify two questions:
a) the construction date, development, and plan of the house to the west of the baths, which was
only integrated into the baths after the earthquake of AD62 when it was transformed into the
currently visible complex with natatio and nymphaea; b) the development and function of the
southern tabernae, which presumably belonged to the baths from the beginning.

Excavations were carried out in 8 areas, both reopening areas investigated by earlier researchers and
opening new areas: tabernae 3, 6, 7, 52, 53, 56, 57; corridor H’.

The house that coexisted with the baths until AD62 had already been partially explored in previous
years. This year, further razed walls and different pavements were found. These allow to reconstruct
a large atrium that was flanked by 3–4 rooms and a vestibule in the south; 3 cubicula and an ala in
the west; and a tablinum and triclinium in the north. The atrium was most likely complemented by a
peristyle courtyard, of which only the pavements of the porticoes and an underground channel
survive, however. The pavements include simple cement floors, decorated cement floors, and a
broad range of high quality black-and-white or polychrome tessellatum mosaics, with regularly cut
small tesserae or irregularly cut large tesserae and pieces of different kinds of marble. Like in 2021,
coins of Vespasian were found in the fills that served to raise the floors for the tabernae of the baths,
confirming that the house was abandoned after the earthquake of AD62. The stratigraphy and
typology of the pavements suggest that the house was built around 50BC. A wall made of Sarno
limestone and several pozzi were discovered under the pavements of the house; these could have
belonged to a predecessor that may have been built even before the construction of the baths after
130/125BC.

Excavation of tabernae 6 and 7 showed that they belonged to the first phase of the Stabian Baths
because their walls were founded on the same type of earth mortar as many other walls of the
original baths. The floor level was about 60–70cm lower than today, however, and the north wall of
taberna 6 included a large door to the complex with laconicum in the southwest corner of the
palaestra that was found in 2021. Various floor levels and installations were discovered in both
tabernae. A turtle that was pregnant with one egg was found between the two lowest floors of
taberna 6, next to an installation in the southwest corner. In the center of taberna 7, the large
drainage channel that ran from the latrine of the baths through the palaestra to the Via
dell’Abbondanza was excavated; it was covered with a vault of caementitium which in previous
excavations has been attributed to the channel’s construction phase in the early Imperial period.