Help using pompeiiinpictures

The structure and approach of the site

The pictures on this site correspond with the numbers on the doorways and the Pompeii Plan of Excavations (Autore Dr. Ing. Hans Eschebach) which you can buy for 11 euros in the bookshops next to the ticket offices at Pompeii. 

Every property (house, caupona, workshop, shop, tomb, sepolcri, villa, gate, tower etc) has its own web page based on the standard regio . insula . house number such as IX.11.1 used for the excavations at Pompeii. See Numbering for a detailed explanation.

The regio . insula . house numbers given on a web page or plan correspond to the numbers on the doorway, on the plan and onsite.   Using our 80,000 photographs, comparing the photographs of the numbers, the property either side or behind and matching the edges of the photographs we believe the house numbered photograph pages are a highly accurate record of what is on the ground.  There will no doubt be occasional difficulties where one house merges into another with no easily spotted boundary.

The house names have however been gathered from a number of sources and there are bound to be discrepancies. You will find the same house may have many different names or has been renamed or referred to by different names, accurately or inaccurately, over the last few centuries.  Not all houses have names. 

     If it is important to your research, you should check the accuracy for yourself. 

Remember throughout this pompeiiinpictures site that its name and email addresses have three iii and no spaces.

The site has been designed for a screen resolution of 800 by 600 and to meet the standard of a maximum of 30 seconds load time using a 56k modem.  As it is a picture site this has not always been possible and a few pages may be a little slower than this.

All pictures are reduced to the web resolution for publication.

Finding your way around pages

The web pages are arranged in layers with clickable plans to make them easy to use.

Please click on the pompeiiinpictures plans or, if you prefer, the links below the plans.

The main plan is on the home page. Clicking on any regio (I to IX and Villas and Sepolcri) will take you to next level down which is a plan of that regio.

On each regio plan you can click on the number of the insula that you want. This will take you down to the next level which is the insula plan.

On the insula plan you can click on the number or letter of the house that you want. This will give you the photographs of that house.

If you know the name of the house you can

Click on the Names Index button on the left of any page,

Click on the first letter of the house name (Ignore the House or Casa part of the name). This will give you the page for houses of that letter of the alphabet.

Then find the name in the list and click on the link to the right of it.

pompeiiinpictures sites

There are several copies of the pompeiiinpictures site

www.pompeiiinpictures.com

www.pompeiiinpictures.org

www.pompeiiinpictures.info

www.pompeiiinpictures.net

www.pompeiiinpictures.eu

The content is identical on all of these, though during the time it takes to carry out updates one may lag behind the other for a short period.

These sites are hosted separately and the hosting providers support for software is different.

This means the page colours and the top and left menu bar contents look different at present.

We hope eventually to standardise this.

Menu buttons

On the left of each page you will find a series of links:

These link to themed pages or plans, such as all the street altars and shrines, fountains etc.

They also include links to the names index, help, the glossary etc.

Depending on which version of the site you use:

On each page you may find a small navigation box with up to 4 buttons in it.  These are Previous, Home, Up and Next.

Back or Next will take you from pictures of one house to the pictures of the house next door on either side or from plan to plan. 

Clicking the Up button will take you to the plan or page above. 

Home will take you back to the starting page with the main plan.

        OR

On the top of the page you may find links to plans which will allow you to navigate the site with less going up and down menus.

These will be links to regio plans to allow you to go directly to a regio.

In most cases there will be further links, set in the context of where you are currently looking: for example:

if you are looking at an insula then it will show the links to all the insulae in that regio.

if you are looking at gates or towers it will show links to all the gates or towers.

if you are looking at tombs it will show links to plans for other tombs.

On your keyboard you also have a Home key and an End key.

These are usually in a group of keys towards the right hand end of the keyboard.

Pressing the Home key will take you to the top of the web page.

Pressing the End key will take you to the bottom of the web page.

Plans

The plans on this site have been drawn by us. To avoid the minefield of copyright, permissions, or the difficulties and delays of finding plans in the first place we have drawn our own. The plans and the room descriptions on our photographs reflect "Pompeian North"  which Dobbins and Foss define in their glossary as "the modern simplification of compass points based on the location of Vesuvius in relation to Pompeii". Most, but not all, plans are oriented with north to the top.

The house plans are generally based on the 1983 Eschebach plan. We also consult the plans published by Van der Poel in C.T.P., Liselotte Eschebach in 1993, Jashemski in 1993, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill in 1994 and Dobbins and Foss in 2008. Individual plans can also come from a wide variety of sources. They often differ widely in their interpretation of what is a door or window or where houses start and finish. To these we add any changes we may find on the ground when we visit.

Our plans are simply for guidance, intended to clarify which rooms our pictures relate to. They are in no way to be regarded as accurately surveyed or to use the same room numbers as other plans to which we cannot get access, though we do use these where we can. Doors and windows have also tended to fall down, been bombed or have been inaccurately recorded or were simply inaccessible and unrecorded . This makes it difficult to be accurate as to some features.

We should therefore issue a health warning, namely that you should check back to original sources if it is important to you.

Picture use

These pictures are intended for private study and academic use and we make no charge for any of our pictures. 

Pictures must not be used for commercial purposes without obtaining the permission of the Ministry for the Cultural Assets and Activities - Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei.

Pompeii numbering system

We have used the standard numbering system used for the excavations at Pompeii to reference each house, shop or workshop on this web site.  This will help you tie in with the site plans and other documentation more easily.

For an explanation of the numbering system: Click here

Glossary of Latin terms with Italian equivalent and English meaning.  

We have included a glossary of some of the Latin terms used in connection with Pompeii that may be relevant to this web site.

This lists the Latin terms in alphabetic order,  their Italian equivalent,  and their English meaning. Their singular and plural forms are also given.

The inclusion of Italian is intended to help with many of the sources for study which are of course in Italian.

Our thanks to Michael Binns for providing this comprehensive glossary.

Click here for the glossary of terms:

Finding a house by name using the names index

Many of the index entries have been collected from various books each of which may have discrepancies, disagreements or differences according to the view or language of the author.   We have not checked these out and feel the index will be more useful with more entries in than less.  If it is important to your research you should check these out yourself.  The numbers given in the index correspond to the numbers on the doorway, on the plan and onsite.

Click here for the index of house names:

Roman Personal Names

The names of Roman citizens originally had a basic format very similar to that of modern English names, as in Gaius Marius, having first a personal name and then the family name.

However, as time passed, some additional features were added to the end to show wider family relationship and origin.

This page gives an explanation of the structure of Roman Personal Names of Men, Women, Adoptions, Slaves, Freedmen, the abbreviations used, the tribes, Patricians and Plebeians, Roman Social Classes and the career structures in public life.

Click here for an explanation of Roman Personal Names.

How to email pompeiiinpictures

If you wish to send email from your own email programme send it to

      info @ pompeiiinpictures.com (with no spaces around the @)

You can of course attach pictures to your email.

If you have several pictures, paintings or sketches see "How to send your pictures to us" on this page below.

Do you have pictures you can send to us?

We are particularly interested in any pictures that add new views or information to the site or show features no longer in existence or provide a comparison with how a particular part of the site used to look. 

This could include any photographs of items no longer in situ.

Format should be JPEG with little or no compression. 

Resolution should be as high as possible in order to allow us to use zoom to match features if we need to identify where they are in Pompeii.  

If possible please let us know as much information as you can on

Approximately when they were taken

Where you think they are located in Pompeii

The regio.insula.house number if you know it or if not then as much as you do know.

Confirmation that you own the copyright

Your agreement that we can publish them on the site.

How to send your pictures to us

You can use ordinary email for pictures. Email suppliers typically have a limit of 10mb per email. A single picture from a current digital camera may be 5mb.

A second option we use is yousendit.com which has offers a free account allowing you to send up to 50mb in a single zip file.

You need to create the zip file first before using yousendit.

The option with the most capacity is Dropbox which has free accounts with up to 2gb. See Dropbox for more information or to sign up for a free account

If you get a free account through this Dropbox link you will also increase the pompeiiinpictures quota by 250mb giving us more space to receive everyones photos.

We reserve the right to publish or not publish or to remove pictures if circumstances require.