The ancient city of Pompeii is a goldmine of ancient Roman history and culture. Here, you can witness what life was like in an Italian city in 79 AD. The city has been preserved since that year after Mount Vesuvius erupted, covering the streets and everything in them in a thick layer of dust. Today, visitors can wander the cobblestone streets of the city, marvelling at rustic old buildings and laneways that you can almost picture the hustle and bustle of daily life on.
At the center of Pompeii, you’ll find the Lupanar of Pompeii. This building is often marked by a steady stream of visitors passing through its doors wanting to capture the wall murals that lie in wait inside.
But what is this building and why is it so popular with visitors?
The Lupanar of Pompeii is actually the most famous brothel in the city and is of particular interest to visitors because of the slew of erotic paintings that cover its walls.
The building got its name from the Latin word for “brothel”, which translates as meaning wolf den. A prostitute was known as a “lupa”, or a she-wolf.
Also known as the Lupanare Grande, the brothel can be found two blocks away from the forum on the intersection of Vico del Lupanare and Vico del Balcone Pensile.
The Significance of Brothels in Pompeii
Lupanar of Pompeii isn’t the only brothel in the city, it’s just the biggest and the most famous. In fact, early excavators of the city decided that any building with walls adorned with erotic paintings should be classified as brothels, and it turns out that Pompeii had a lot of buildings with erotic paintings on their walls.
Using this method of classification, it quickly came to light that Pompeii had no less that 35 lupanares before disaster struck in 79 AD. If we do some quick math using the stat that Pompeii had 10,000 residents during the first century, we learn that there was a brothel for every 71 adult males.
The brothels at this time weren’t grand buildings with opulent fixtures and fittings like you might expect from ancient Rome. Instead, they were particularly small with just a few, intimate rooms. The Lupanar of Pompeii was by far the biggest brothel found in the city, with around 10 rooms at the time of discovery.
The rooms inside the brothels seemed to be decorated in a simple fashion, with just a mattress on a brick platform as a bed. Perhaps the most fascinating part of the brothels today, though, is the graffiti that still remains. So far, there have been 134 different works of graffiti that have been transcribed from inside the Lupanar.
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