ABSTRACT
It has long been held that the world of the Roman fullo was first and foremost a rather smelly affair, and that the malodorous nature of their businesses meant that fullones faced serious challenges in negotiating their social position, or were even obliged to conduct their work in the periphery of the city so that they would not disturb civic live with the smell of rotten urine. This chapter evaluates the work done by fullers from a multisensory perspective, and discusses how this impacted on the social and cultural roles of fullers in their urban communities. The discussions starts from the idea that the sensory landscapes of workshops like fullonicae provided an infrastructure that played a vital role in the cultural perception of the production processes and shaped the stage on which craftsmen and workers negotiated their occupational and social identities.
