ABSTRACT
When, a century ago, Mau wrote about the Pompeian house, he could state withconfidence that “the development of the Italic house can be traced at Pompeii over a period of almost four hundred years”.1 That confidence, characteristic of the advances of systematic nineteenth-century science, would have been impossible a hundred years previously; and new advances today make it inappropriate to continue repeating the time-honoured schema of the evolution of “the Italic house”. At the start of the twenty-first century, we must register that we know rather less about such an evolution than was supposed, though the evidence is gradually accumulating that will help us pose the questions better.
