The Roman Emperor Nero's Toilet at Villa Poppaea at Oplontis
Villa Poppaea.
When you're visiting Pompeii on a day trip out of Napoli, you can get a multi-site ticket good for visits to three ancient sites within a three-day period. Pompeii is, of course, the most obvious, and Herculaneum is the second place people tend to visit, as it's a smaller and more affluent town, better preserved in some ways due to being buried by a lahar or volcanic mudflow, rather than directly in hot ash and pumice.
The grounds of Villa Poppaea, showing the 10 meters or more of ash.
A third site, also easily accessible via the Circumvesuviana train, is listed on the ticket as Oplonti. It's really the Villa Poppaea, an opulent Roman villa owned by the Emperor Nero in the Roman town of Oplontis.
Take the Circumvesuviana train to the modern town of Torre Annunziata, Exit the station and follow the signs to Scavi, Italian for Ruins.
The first block takes you to a busy road. Once you're across that, it's just another two or three blocks to the site.
Modern downtown Torre Annunziata.
As you can see above, the villa was fully buried under 10 meters or more of ash.
The villa's site was rediscovered during brief excavations in the 18th century, but the complete site, including a 60 by 15 meter swimming pool, was not fully excavated until the 1970s.
Nero was born 15 December 37 AD (according to the Julian calendar, of course!), and ruled from 13 October 54 until his death by suicide on 9 June 68.
He was just 30 years old and had ruled for less than 14 years, but he had accomplished quite a bit. Struggling to find some positive side to Nero (this is like "Hitler liked dogs"), he put restrictions on the amounts of bails and fines, and limited lawyers' fees. He negotiated a peace treaty with Parthia after a series of wars, and dealt with uprisings by the Druids and Boudica in Britannia. He tried to build a canal at Corinth, a project that wasn't finished until 1893. He was liked by many of the people, especially the lower class and those living safely far away in the Eastern Empire.
Latrine inside Villa Poppaea.
On the negative side there was his rise to power, where his mother Agrippina poisoned the reigning Emperor Claudius according to ancient historians (54); the murder of his mother (59), adoptive brother, and others; the Great Fire of Rome (64) and the following persecution of Christians; the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem (70); and lots of other sociopathic behavior.
Fresco inside Villa Poppaea.
In 53, Nero married his stepsister Claudia Octavia. Then, in 58, Nero began an affair with Poppaea Sabina, the wife of his friend (and future Emperor) Otho. He then ordered the murder of his mother in 59 because it did not seem politically feasible to divorce his stepsister and marry his friend's wife while his mother was alive.
Meanwhile, he owned this villa in Oplontis. After he married Poppaea Sabina in 59, she used this as her main residence when she was not in Rome. At least until Nero killed her, anyway.
The frescoes are outstanding examples of the high point of the form and color of Roman work, including perspective and trompe-l'oeil effects that would not be equalled in Italy until the beginnings of the Renaissance in the 15th century.
Latrine inside Villa Poppaea.
A severe earthquake in 62 damaged the villa, it was still under repair when it was buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79.
No one was living there at the time, as Nero had killed Poppaea by kicking her in the abdomen during late pregnancy.
The latrine is fairly large, there would have been room for several seats around the U-shaped space.
It's the classic Greco-Roman design as seen at Ephesus and elsewhere — a fairly deep waste channel against a wall, a raised seating surface (apparently of wood or otherwise not surviving today), and a low water channel for handwashing flowing past the users' feet.
Click here for my page about visiting Napoli, known as Naples in English.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box."
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.
My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous Toilet of the World page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that I split it into categories, and the collection has grown ever since.
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):
