Excavations at Pompeii reveal a large private bath built 2,000 years ago

Archaeologists in Pompeiian ancient Roman city covered in ash and lava in AD 70 has uncovered a private bathhouse built more than 2,000 years ago, officials said Friday.

The discovery includes lavish mosaics and is equipped with a series of warm, hot and cold rooms and a huge spa-style plunge pool.

“Here we have perhaps the largest thermal complex in a private house in Pompeii,” said Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park. “Members of Pompeii’s ruling class set up vast spaces in their homes to hold banquets.”

Spa-like baths were discovered in the so-called Regio IX, the still unexplored central area of ​​the Pompeii park, where the main archaeological excavations they reveal new aspects of the daily life of Pomejan.

“It’s these spaces that are part of the ‘Pompeii effect’ — it’s almost as if people left just a minute ago,” Zuchtriegel told CBS News. BBC News.

Zuchtriegel said that wealthy residents of Pompeii often bathed first and then held a banquet, so the private spa complex allowed this to be done in the same house.

“There’s room for about 30 people who could do the whole routine, and it could be done in the public baths. So there’s a calidarium, a very warm environment and also a big tub of cold water,” he said.

Recently, archaeologists working in the same area found a bakery, a laundry, two mansions and the bones of three people who died during the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuviuswhich also destroyed the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The bodies belonged to a woman, who was holding jewelry and coins, and a young man in his teens or early 20s, the BBC reported.

“The pyroclastic flow from Mount Vesuvius came down the street just outside this room and caused the wall to collapse, and that basically crushed it to death,” Sophie Hay, an archaeologist at Pompeii, told the BBC. “The woman was still alive while he was dying – imagine the trauma – and then this room filled with the rest of the pyroclastic flow, and that’s how she died.”