Bread has always been a cornerstone of our culinary culture—so essential that it has become a synonym for nourishment itself. A symbol of life, sharing, and tradition, it has traversed the centuries while maintaining its social and cultural value.
In this room, we focus on the simple raw ingredients used to produce flour, up to the fragrant loaves that once released their aroma through the streets of ancient Herculaneum. We can admire not only the remains of carbonized bread with their characteristic round shape—often marked with radial cuts for easier slicing and sometimes stamped with distinctive marks—but also the raw ingredients used for their preparation.
Not only wheat, but also spelt, millet, barley, and broad beans—essential ingredients in a varied and refined diet. Alongside these, milling and baking tools recount the meticulous process that gave birth to an indispensable food item. Originally, bread was made exclusively at home.
Numerous hand mills found in the domus attest that this practice remained widespread even after the rise of the first bakeries (pistrina). The growing demand and improvement of sieving, grinding, and baking techniques fostered the emergence of specialized figures like the pistor (baker), who used state-of-the-art tools for the time—such as the kneading machine: a large lava stone basin with an iron pin and a wooden rod with horizontal arms to mix the ingredients.
The dough included sourdough (fragments of which have been found), and the bread was baked directly in the oven. We can imagine the crackle of the fire, the enveloping heat, the aroma spreading through the city streets. Other baked goods, such as cakes and flatbreads (placentae), were prepared in special bronze pans of various sizes, many of which were found in Herculaneum’s shops.
The room also features a photographic reproduction of the famous frieze from the tomb of Roman baker Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, located near Porta Maggiore, depicting all the stages of bread-making.
At the back of the room is a reconstructed oven, accurately replicating a section of the one discovered in a side room of Sextus Patulcius Felix’s pistrinum. The original model, made of masonry, rested on a large base whose tiled surface extended into the oven mouth. The vaulted cover formed a dome, with a ventilation duct inside created by reusing the neck of an amphora. On the exterior of the dome stand two apotropaic phalluses—auspicious symbols intended to protect the structure from the evil eye.
Grinding machines, ovens, and modern utensils help us understand ancient ones, thanks to the centuries-long continuity of bread production. In addition to ovens, the bakeries of Herculaneum feature the typical mola asinariae—mills operated by pack animals. One of them, a little donkey, was found beside one of the two mills in the southern alley pistrinum (Insula Orientalis II), a thrilling discovery we owe to archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri, who led excavations between 1927 and 1961.