Italian Marble at MarbleFilm.com

• Italian Marble use at Pompeii
• House of the Vettii
• Thasian dolomitic marble

THASIAN DOLOMITIC MARBLE

Thasian dolomitic marble, Pentelic and Luna were also used in this one small context. Again, the owner must have been trying to impress with this range of marbles: it would surely have been easier and cheaper to make the whole triclinium from Luna or perhaps Pentelic. In 2004 I will be prospecting for similar groupings of white marble objects to sample (in a separate phase) and carrying out another project which has been in the back of my mind even longer than the Vettii basins. This concerns the striking marble-paved countertops of Pompeii's many streetside fastfood shops, or bars. Bars had a bad reputation in Roman law as places where dissolute people gathered late into the night and were served by loose women. Installing marble countertops must have been, at least in part, an effort to offset that reputation. But the Sleazy Bars Project (the name was irresistible despite Steven Ellis' persuasive case that the bars could hardly have deserved the worst said about them and in fact were a necessity for mobile urban populations) is trying to extract specific evidence about the marble trade from the counters. If you are interested, read the grant proposal to the University of Akron's Faculty Research Committee, whose support has been critical, and stay tuned for updates later in the summer.