The housing of a major commercial city of the high imperial age is best studied at Ostia, largely rebuilt according to new building standards during the
second and early third centuries A.D. Here, although some single-storey domus still survived and new kinds of courtyard houses, complete with
resplendent marble veneer, were added at a later date, the characteristic type of accommodation was the insula, or apartment block, three, four, or five
storeys high. Unlike the domus, this faced outwards, with large windows often opening on to shallow balconies (not always accessible, however, and
designed more to shelter the windows beneath than to provide extra space for the tenants). Its great virtue was its flexibility, both in plan and, as a
consequence, in the life-style that it offered. It could take the form of a long narrow block, one living-unit in depth; of a rather deeper block, with two
sets of living-units arranged back to back; or, where a building plot was particularly deep or neighbouring buildings obstructed the light, of a four-
sided block round a central court. Within these basic formulae the variations were legion. A favourite treatment of the street front, foreshadowing the
architecture of medieval and Renaissance Italy, was a succession of barrel-vaulted shops interspersed with stairways leading straight from the street to
the upper storeys. The ground floor of the insula might, alternatively, be divided into two or four more or less identical self-contained flats, entered
either directly from the exterior or from an internal dividing corridor. Sometimes, as in the House of the Muses and the House of the Painted Vaults,
the whole, or a large part, of the ground floor constituted a single living-unit. In such cases the occupant was perhaps also the owner of the block, and
the other occupants his tenants; at the very least he was himself a superior tenant, able to afford space and amenities denied to his upstairs neighbours,
many of whom may have had very small apartments and even single rooms.
Garden Houses At Ostia (A.D. 117-38): one of a pair of identical blocks at least three, and probably four, storeys high. These symmetrically planned
groups of maisonettes surrounded by open space must have presented a remarkably modern appearance.
We know less about the quality of life in the Ostian insulae than we do for the houses of Pompeii, because so few of the furnishings and fittings
survive. Doubtless standards of comfort were a great deal higher than in Late-Republican Rome; and doubtless Juvenal's accounts of tumbling
tenements and the constant danger of incineration in the Rome of his own day were somewhat exaggerated. But conditions in these multiple dwellings
could not have been ideal. Even if water could be piped to the ground floor, upstairs tenants would still have been obliged to draw water from the
public fountains or cisterns. Very few flats would have had private lavatories: the cry of 'gardyloo' was perhaps as familiar in the streets of Ostia as it
was in eighteenth-century Edinburgh. Moreover there was enough timber in the upper floors and internal fittings to make the risk of fire a real one,
especially since no truly safe means of heating and cooking were available. Lighting also remained a problem, as at Pompeii, for those tenants who
could not afford window glass; many windows -were filled with barely translucent panes of selenite or simply had wooden shutters.
Country residences, like town dwellings, ranged over the whole gamut of possibilities, from simple huts and cottages through small working farms to
grand villas in which the management of an estate, though generally an important factor, was strictly segregated from a luxurious quarter in which the
owner could maintain a life-style appropriate to his taste and station. This last type is well represented in the archaeological record, both in the
countryside devastated by the eruption of Vesuvius, and in other parts of Italy and the Empire. We also see it portrayed in Pompeian paintings and
read about it in the letters of Cicero and Pliny. Generalizations are difficult, but recurrent features included peristyle gardens, grand colonnaded
facades, and (on sloping ground) a podium which Vitru-vius calls the basis uillae, often containing an underground corridor (cryptoporticus). In the
grandest examples, including the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum and the recently excavated villa at Oplontis, west of Pompeii, both of which have
been attractively ascribed to leading families of the Roman nobility, no check was imposed upon the spatial extent of the buildings. At the same time
such villas, unlike the aristocratic town-houses, were outward-looking; their colonnaded facades and terraces addressed themselves to a landscape or
overlooked a garden. In the coolness and shelter of the portico the owner could stroll and philosophize, like the Younger Pliny, about the delights of
nature, far from the toils of the city. A favourite form, especially renowned in the Bay of Naples and reflected in numerous murals, was the maritime
villa, built along the sea-front or even terraced out into the sea; Pliny, for example, could dine in his Laurentine villa with 'a view from the front and
sides, as it were, of three different seas' (above, p. 660). In vain did Horace inveigh against the villa-builders of fashionable Baiae, whose concrete
piers seemed almost to remodel the coast-line.