ABSTRACT
The vast majority of houses in Pompeii and Herculaneum take the form of roomsaround inner courtyards, many, especially in Pompeii, conforming in plan to what has become known as the “atrium house.” Nineteenth-and early twentiethcentury excavators of these towns concentrated their interest on such houses, because they saw in them the materialization of textual references to Roman houses, particularly those in the architectural manuals of Vitruvius on how to build an ideal town house.1
