Polo Museale Civico della Santissima Annunziata - Domus di Arianna

Under the floor of Sulmona's Annunziata palace, excavators found a Roman town house where Dionysus met Ariadne in painted panels; its mosaics, walls and coloured stratigraphy remain preserved beneath the palace.

Why it matters

The Domus di Arianna is a Roman house discovered not in a field but inside the city: during renovation work on a ground-floor room of the Palazzo della SS. Annunziata in 1991–1993, excavators came upon the remains of a dwelling inhabited from the first century BC to about the mid-second century AD. Preserved in situ beneath the palazzo, the domus retains floors and wall remains from Roman Sulmona. The house takes its name from its finest surviving paintings, a cycle in the Third Pompeian Style that includes the sacred union of Dionysus and Ariadne, and the State's cultural catalogue records it as the archaeological property beneath the palazzo on Corso Ovidio.

What to notice

The house was modest in plan but refined in finish. Its main rooms lay about 1.80 metres below the current floor and wrapped around a small open courtyard with a rough floor, perhaps holding a basin for rainwater. Most rooms had mosaics of white tiles edged with a black border, while the last two — probably service rooms — had floors of opus signinum, the crushed-tile mortar of practical spaces. Later builders stripped most of the Roman walls for material, but stretches of opus quasi reticulatum masonry survive in view, and the excavation team marked the different building phases with mortars of different colours, so the house reads almost like a diagram of its own history. Wall panels in the Third Pompeian Style, reassembled from fragments found in the excavation, depict Dionysian subjects: the sacred marriage of Dionysus and Ariadne, and the comic dispute of Eros and Pan with a judge, probably a Silenus. The Eros and Pan panel is a damaged but high-quality example of late Third Style work.

Context and history

The domus belongs to Roman Sulmona, the Corfinium-era network of the Peligna valley whose street grid still underlies the medieval city; the State catalogue records that the house's alignments match the reconstructed Roman street plan, with road paving and sewers documented nearby on via Ciofano. The excavated rooms show the house's biography: rooms A and B, at the south end and north-west side, belong to the oldest phase in ashlar work, while room C was originally a single large space later divided by a wall in quasi-reticulate technique — the same late-first-century-BC restructuring that downsized the main room to meet new needs. After antiquity the site was buried under medieval, Renaissance and modern levels, and it re-emerged only when the palace above was renovated in the early 1990s. The archaeological section of the civic museums presents the finds from the site — Roman, medieval and Renaissance objects, maiolica, coins and everyday items, alongside material from the Ocriticum sanctuary and the Pelignian territory — so the domus functions as both exhibit and exhibit-case for the city's deep stratigraphy.