Vita gazette – a prison bakery emerged, where enslaved people and donkeys were locked up and exploited to grind the grain needed to make bread in Pompeii.

As part of a project to secure and maintain the still uninvestigated area of ​​the ancient city of Pompeii, a prison bakery emerged, where enslaved people and donkeys were locked up and exploited to grind the grain needed to produce the bread.

A prison bakery, where enslaved people and donkeys were locked up and exploited to grind the grain needed to produce bread. A narrow room with no external view, with small windows with iron grates for the passage of light. And carvings on the floor to coordinate the movement of the animals, forced to wander around for hours blindfolded.

The investigations revealed a house being renovated. A home is divided – as often happens – into a residential sector decorated with refined 4th-style frescoes and a production district intended for bread-making.

The production sector highlighted the need for doors and communications with the outside; the only exit leads to the atrium; not even the stable has road access, as is frequent in other cases. “It is, in other words, a space in which we must imagine the presence of people of servile status whose owner felt the need to limit the freedom of movement – ​​points out the Director Gabriel Zuchtriegel in a scientific article published by many today in the E-Journal of the Pompeii excavations http://pompeiisites.org/e-journal-degli-scavi-di-pompei/ – It is the most shocking side of ancient slavery, the one devoid of relationships of trust and promises of tampering, where it was reduced to brute violence, an impression which is fully confirmed by the closing of the few windows with iron grates.”

Around the millstones, a series of semicircular recesses can be identified in the volcanic basalt slabs. Given the strong resistance of the material, it is likely that what at first glance might appear to be “footprints” are notches explicitly made to prevent draft animals from slipping on the pavement and, at the same time, to trace a path, thus forming a “furrow”. circular” (curva canalis) as Apuleius also describes it.

“The iconographic and literary sources, particularly the reliefs from the tomb of Eurysaces in Rome, suggest that a millstone was normally moved by a couple made up of a donkey and an enslaved person. In addition to pushing the grindstone, the latter had the task of encouraging the animal and monitoring the grinding process, adding grain and removing flour.”

The wear of the various carvings can be ascribed to the infinite number of turns, always the same, carried out according to the pattern laid out in the flooring. Rather than a groove, one, therefore, comes to think of the gear of a clockwork mechanism designed to synchronise the movement around the four millstones concentrated in this area.

On the place’s floor, you can also see carvings to coordinate the movement of the animals, who were forced to walk around for hours blindfolded to grind the grain.

The system emerged in Regio IX, insula 10, where excavations are underway as part of a broader project to secure and maintain the fronts surrounding the still uninvestigated area of Pompeii.