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House of the Beautiful Courtyard (Casa del Bel Cortile) (Herculaneum)

A house with a beautiful courtyard as the name implies was named after the courtyard which occupies most of the building. The building itself was built in the middle of the first century AD. The arrangement of rooms here is somewhat unusual for ancient Roman houses. So at the entrance to the lobby of the house on the right were three rooms. Next, you find yourself in the patio itself. Further from this courtyard there is a staircase upstairs to the second floor, where there were three rooms of a private nature.

The house with a beautiful or lovely courtyard is located on the east side of Cardo IV. The house is quite unusually located, more similar to the architecture of the Italian medieval building than to the ancient world. Entrance (a) opens into a long low room with a ceiling (b), which serves both as the lobby and atrium of the house. The room has preserved some of the decorations. The murals belong to the fourth style, which consisted of geometric patterns.

From it south of the entrance are three small cubes - small rooms ((c), (d) and (e)) with a simple fourth-style decoration. On the north side of the lobby was a small kitchen (f), which has an extremely low doorway (as shown on the right), and on the side there is an entrance to the courtyard (g), after which the house was named.

The yard rises above the level of the vestibule and connects to the large Tablinum (I) in the south. The courtyard, which is decorated with frescoes in the fourth style with shades of red. There is also a wide staircase with a parapet very similar to medieval architecture. The four rooms upstairs connected to the landing and a wooden balcony that protrudes from the front of the house overlooking Cardo IV. These rooms have preserved several frescoes in the fourth style.

Tablinum is located south of the courtyard. This large rectangular room has an intricate mosaic floor. The room, which occupies more than a quarter of the total area on the ground floor, is decorated in the fourth style using red and yellow colors. On the western wall is a glass box with some human remains. It was unlikely that this was the owner of the house. Families usually moved together and therefore perished together. It is possible that it was a slave who was sent back to pick up some valuable thing. However, there are archaeologists who have suggested that this is the body of a thief who decided to rob a rich abandoned house. We probably will never know the reasons why a person stayed, but it is known that death overtook him here.

On the north side of the courtyard is a fairly large room (h), which is decorated with fourth-style frescoes with red panels. The murals contain architectural themes and human figures on a white background. In the picture you can also see part of the decor of the first floor, which also used the fourth style on a white background.