Housing connected to the street
Ostia, the port city of ancient Rome, preserves multi-storey residential buildings. The Hadrianic House of Diana had shops opening onto the street and an interior arranged around a porticoed courtyard; it may originally have had four storeys. Commercial frontages and housing allowed one plot to accommodate different urban activities.
The House of the Painted Ceiling likewise occupied a Hadrianic block. It combined residential and commercial use, with upper floors reached by external stairs. These routes gave residents access to their living spaces while maintaining connections to the street, turning a building’s height into separately accessible floors.
From passages into rooms
The House of the Painted Ceiling was entered from the street through a covered passage. Its rooms opened onto a central hall illuminated by tall windows. Walls, doors, windows and passages jointly arranged people’s movement and the entry of daylight.
The House of Diana organized space differently: a portico surrounded the courtyard, with rooms connected to it. The courtyard lay within everyday routes rather than simply outside the building. These surviving plans show several ways of organizing urban residence instead of a single courtyard or room arrangement.
Decorating a place to live
Early floors in the House of Diana included black-and-white geometric mosaics, polychrome mosaics and inlaid marble. In the later second century the courtyard gained a marble-decorated fountain structure, while surviving paintings belong to the end of that century. Floors, walls and the courtyard setting all received investment.
Two rooms in the House of the Painted Ceiling preserve wall paintings and one painted ceiling, possibly from a late second-century renovation. The remains demonstrate that multi-storey housing could contain carefully decorated rooms. Materials and images changed the interior environment, making decorative work part of a residence’s continuing use.
Adapting existing rooms
The House of the Painted Ceiling was eventually divided into smaller independent apartments. The House of Diana also underwent repeated changes to internal walls and floors; in the third century its floors were raised and new mosaics laid. Existing structures remained while the boundaries and heights of living spaces could be rearranged.
A mithraeum was later installed in inner rooms of the House of Diana, with a shrine, a reused marble altar and masonry benches. Successive uses accumulated within the building. Shops, circulation routes, decoration and later alterations together preserve a history of the continuing adjustment of urban space.