Please click on one of the links below to see the help available.
Some of these links will take you to specific pages of the web site from where you can carry on through the web site.
To get back to help at any time you can click on the Help button which is on every page.
Welcome to herculaneuminpictures
The structure and approach of the site
HerculaneuminPictures and PompeiiinPictures sites
Glossary of Latin terms with Italian equivalent and English meaning.
Finding a house by name using the index
How to email herculaneuminpictures
Do you have pictures you can send to us?
How to send your pictures to us
Right to publish or remove pictures
Herculaneum and Pompeii have always intrigued Jackie. Having read many books on the ancient cities, it was most confusing when, for example two different books gave a differing location for the same property. Many of the books only contained photos of the same well visited houses. None showed the smaller homes and houses, which seemed ignored but just as interesting.
Jackie and husband Bob have tried to build a photographic record indicating all the doorways of houses, shops, temples, workshops, bars and ancient pubs as a way to provide a comprehensive record and help clear any mysteries once and for all.
In using this site you can see Herculaneum as it really is.
The pictures on this site correspond with the numbers on the doorways at Herculaneum.
Every property (house, caupona, workshop, shop, tomb, sepolcri, villa, gate, tower etc) has its own web page based on the standard insula and house number such as VI.21 used for the excavations at Herculaneum.
The insula . house numbers given on a web page or plan correspond to the numbers on the doorway, on the plan and onsite. Using our photographs, comparing the photographs of the numbers, the property either side or behind and matching the edges of the photographs we believe the house numbered photograph pages are a highly accurate record of what is on the ground. There will no doubt be occasional difficulties where one house merges into another with no easily spotted boundary.
The house names have however been gathered from a number of sources and there are bound to be discrepancies. You will find the same house may have many different names or has been renamed or referred to by different names, accurately or inaccurately, over the last few centuries. Not all houses have names.
If it is important to your research, you should check the accuracy for yourself.
The site has been designed for a screen resolution of 1024 by 768 and to meet the standard of a maximum of 30 seconds load time using a 56k modem. As it is a picture site this has not always been possible and a few pages, particularly those with large maps, may be a little slower than this.
All pictures are reduced to the web resolution 1024 by 768 for publication.
The web pages are arranged in layers with clickable plans to make them easy to use.
Please click on the plans or, if you prefer, the links below the plans.
- The main plan is on the home page. Clicking on any insula will take you to next level down which is a plan of that insula.
- On the insula plan you can click on the number or letter or area of the house that you want. This will give you the photographs of that house.
If you know the name of the house you can
- Click on the Find button on the top of any page.
- Click on the Name Index button.
- Click on the first letter of the house name (Ignore the House or Casa part of the name). This will give you the page for houses of that letter of the alphabet.
- Then find the name in the list and click on the link to the right of it.
There are two Herculaneum sites herculaneum.uk and herculaneuminpictures.com
There are also several copies of the pompeiiinpictures site
The content is identical on all of these, though during the time it takes to carry out updates one may lag behind the other for a short period.
These sites are hosted separately and the hosting providers support for software is different.
At the top of each page you will find a series of buttons.
- The Herculaneum button links to the individual insulae and areas of Herculaneum, the Theatre and the Villa dei Papiri.
- The Find button links to an index of names, a glossary, an explanation of Roman names, a number of old plans and maps that show excavation progress over the centuries and a search facility.
- The Help button links to the Help page and also how to contact us.
- The Surrounds button links the the villas in the surrounding areas and also to pompeiiinpictures.
If you click on a button it will show further related links under it.
On your keyboard you also have a Home key and an End key.
- These are usually in a group of keys towards the right hand end of the keyboard.
- Pressing the Home key will take you to the top of the web page.
- Pressing the End key will take you to the bottom of the web page.
The house plans are mostly based on those in Pesando F. and Guidobaldi M. P., 2006. Pompeii, Oplontis Ercolano et Stabiae. Roma: Laterzi. Plans are either oriented with north to the top or include an indication of where north is to be found. To these plans we add any changes we may find on the ground when we visit.
Individual plans can come from a wide variety of sources and often differ widely in their interpretation of what is a door or window or where houses start and finish. Plans from other sources and in publications may have different numbering of doors.
Our plans are simply for guidance, intended to clarify which rooms our pictures relate to. They are in no way to be regarded as accurately surveyed or to use the same room numbers as other plans to which we cannot get access, though we do use these where we can. Doors and windows may have fallen down, suffered earthquake damage, been bombed or have previously been inaccurately recorded or were simply inaccessible and unrecorded. This makes it difficult to be accurate as to some features in a relatively few cases.
We should therefore issue a health warning, namely that you should check back to original sources if it is important to you.
These pictures are intended for private study and academic or not for profit use and we make no charge for any of our pictures.
Pictures used should have the following citation.
© Jackie and Bob Dunn, www.herculaneum.uk
Su concessione del MiC - Parco Archeologico di Ercolano
If you wish to use the pictures please email us at the email address on the contact page.
Pictures must not be used for commercial purposes without obtaining the permission of the Ministero della Cultura - Parco Archeologico di Ercolano.
We have used the standard numbering system used for the excavations at Herculaneum to reference each house, shop or workshop on this web site. This will help you tie in with the site plans and other documentation more easily.
This broadly consists of
insulae I to VII
Insula Orientalis I
Insula Orientalis II
South-east corner
Villa dei Papiri complex
Links to these will be found in the menus at the top of every page.
We have included a glossary of some of the Latin terms used in connection with Herculaneum that may be relevant to this web site.
This lists the Latin terms in alphabetic order, their Italian equivalent, and their English meaning. Their singular and plural forms are also given.
The inclusion of Italian is intended to help with many of the sources for study which are of course in Italian.
Our thanks to Michael Binns for providing this comprehensive glossary.
For the glossary of terms click here
This index is based on the full names in a house name. You will find the same house may have many different names or has been renamed or referred to by different names, accurately or inaccurately, over the last few centuries. Not all houses have names. Where there are nameplates on the houses themselves we have used these but most have no nameplate on them.
Many of the index entries have been collected from various books each of which may have discrepancies, disagreements or differences according to the view or language of the author. We have not checked these out and feel the index will be more useful with more entries in than with less. If it is important to your research you should check these out yourself. The numbers given in the index correspond to the numbers on the doorway, on the plan and onsite.
For the index of house names click here
The names of Roman citizens originally had a basic format very similar to that of modern English names, as in Gaius Marius, having first a personal name and then the family name.
However, as time passed, some additional features were added to the end to show wider family relationship and origin.
This page gives an explanation of the structure of Roman Personal Names of Men, Women, Adoptions, Slaves, Freedmen, the abbreviations used, the tribes, Patricians and Plebeians, Roman Social Classes and the career structures in public life.
For an explanation of Roman Personal Names click here
If you wish to send email from your own email programme send it to
info @ herculaneum.uk (with no spaces around the @)
You can of course attach pictures to your email.
If you have several pictures, paintings or sketches see "How to send your pictures to us" on this page below.
We are particularly interested in any pictures that add new views or information to the site or show features no longer in existence or provide a comparison with how a particular part of the site used to look.
This could include any photographs of items no longer in situ.
Format should be JPEG with little or no compression.
Resolution should be as high as possible in order to allow us to see enough detail to match features if we need to identify where they are in Herculaneum.
If possible please let us know as much information as you can on
- Approximately when they were taken
- Where you think they are located in Herculaneum
- The insula.house number if you know it or if not then as much as you do know
- Your name and confirmation that you own the copyright
- Your agreement that we can publish them on the site.
We will always acknowledge you under each photograph used, normally in the form "Photograph courtesy of yourname".
You can use ordinary email for sending pictures to the email address on our contacts page. Email suppliers typically have a limit of 10mb per email. This can be cumbersome where a single picture from a current digital camera may be 5mb and you will need several emails to send pictures.
There are several free large file size services available.
Dropbox has free accounts (Dropbox Basic) with up to 2gb. www.dropbox.com
WeTransfer allows you to send up to 2gb of files for free and without having to register www.wetransfer.com
If you want to send us a large number of pictures please contact us first and we may be able to help.
We do reserve the right to publish or not to publish or to remove pictures if circumstances require.