When in Rome: A (slightly Seinfeld-y) study of ancient apartments

It all started when a Swedish influencer asked her boyfriend – who has a tattoo of Cicero¹ on his arm – how much he thought about the Roman Empire, and was surprised to learn the answer was "about an hour a day". She asked her followers to ask their significant others the same question, and a clear trend emerged: guys think about the Roman Empire a lot. About half of them said they thought about it at least weekly. For some, the ancient civilisation came to mind several times a day.

The thing is, this isn’t really a gender thing: anyone who knows a lot about the Roman Empire can’t help but think about the Roman Empire a lot. You see its shadows every time you cross a bridge, or flush the toilet, or use a road.

And in the 21st century – a time when an extraordinary boom in the human population is driving high-density urban living all over the world, with increasing numbers of us calling flats or apartments home – you can’t help but reflect on one of the earliest examples of this residential type: the Roman insula (plural insulae). (In Latin2, the word means ‘island’; the term is thought to have been used because these highrise dwellings emerged like ‘islands’ from the rest of the city fabric.)

It turns out the ‘modern’ experience of communal living, of having a walkable urban environment with amenities close to home, of having neighbours just across the hall or through the wall or over and under you, isn’t all that modern after all.

Flocking to the city

Two-thousand-odd years ago, the city of Rome was a calling card in the same way any major capital is today. We know from poets of the time – particularly the works of Virgil and Horace – that large numbers of people were moving from rural areas to the city. Rome was the ancient world’s New York, or London, or Tokyo. It was where things were happening; where there were opportunities and the promise of a better standard of living, one that many found more appealing than the hard slog of agricultural life. And as happens virtually anywhere in the world when a metropolis is rapidly forming, the buildings that housed all these new citizens started heading in a vertical direction. Although, not for everyone...

To understand where insulae fit in the wider architectural character of these ancient cities, you need to know how the ruling class lived. The wealthiest Romans lived in domus – large, single-story townhouses, often with an interior open-air courtyard (an atrium) and gardens, and with multiple rooms for family, guests and servants. Often they had street-facing rooms that would be leased out as tabernae – essentially small shopfronts, from which merchants could sell goods like wine, or offer services such as tailoring. (Many members of the elite class also had countryside villas where they could escape the heat and hustle of the city. These were often sprawling, extravagant, almost palatial residences, well equipped for entertaining.) The urban domus were sometimes so big they took up entire city blocks – other, more modest examples might be one of several private houses on any one square. Think of these as the homes of Succession-type characters of the time – private, comparatively lavish family residences of patricians, wealthy businessmen, and the rest of the comfortable upper-class.

But a city can’t consist only of enormous mansions full of rich toffs with servants. It needs the grit and hustle of a populace to keep it going. Rome was Rome because it was also home to one million everyday people – the world’s first³ city to reach that milestone – and the plebs⁴ all needed a roof over their heads, too.

And so, alongside the fancy domus of the city’s VIPs sprung up multi-story buildings containing units of various sizes and arrangements, some with shared amenities, often sitting above commercial or retail spaces. One key architectural history text⁵ defined an insula as a “block of tenement dwellings of many storeys [that] seems to have resembled modern flats, or workmen’s dwellings”.

They were apartments pretty much as we know them today – except in this era, the top floors were the least desirable and home to the poorest residents, and building codes were yet to catch up with the risks of high-density living. Many insulae were poorly constructed, and made of highly flammable material. Fire became such a constant hazard that Emperor Augustus established a fire brigade specifically to deal with the problem: this was the vigiles (watchmen), a force funded by a tax on the sale of slaves, and made up of several thousand men.

The vigiles were apparently nicknamed sparteoli, or “little bucket fellows”, for the buckets of water they carried around while on patrol. Whether they ever struck muscle-flexing poses for fundraising calendars is unclear.

Neighbourly relations

It is hard to be certain about exactly who lived in these insulae and what their daily lives were like, but archaeologists can make some pretty good guesses by picking through clues of the ruins that remain. One well-studied insula on a city block in Pompeii was found to consist of a mix of residential and commercial units – 19 all up. (It seems the ancients had naturally cottoned-on to the same thing you’ll hear any good urban planner argue for today – that “mixed use” apartment buildings are crucial to creating a good city vibe. Having hospitality venues and stores or businesses on the ground level is what “activates” a neighbourhood, pulling foot traffic through an area and helping form a convivial, close-knit community.) The street level commercial spaces included a dye workshop, a couple of bakeries, and smaller retail shops. A set of surgical tools and glass bottles were discovered in one of the lower level units, leading scholars to suggest it may have been a doctor’s practice, or pharmacy – although they cannot be sure it wasn’t merely a cosmetics counter of some kind. The upper residential levels (it is unclear exactly how many stories were originally there⁶) sometimes extended over the ground floor area of an adjacent unit, and it is thought that a mix of families of the merchants, individual tenants, and the slaves (or former slaves) of neighbouring domus lived within them.

Whatever the makeup of a group of residents in one of these apartment blocks, they would have had regular interactions and no choice but to adopt a cooperative approach to daily living.

If a sitcom like Seinfeld⁷ were to be set in this Pompeii insula, it would surely involve regular scenes of neighbours ‘popping in to poop’ in the only toilet on the level.

Or perhaps dashing down the hall to fill a cooking pot up with water, and spilling it all on the way back. Although the complex was hooked up to mains water supply (aqueducts were of course one of the best-known perks of Roman city life), not all units had their own cistern or water outlet. Even just turning a tap on where there was one was likely to have been a group effort – one archaeologist’s paper⁸ analysing the arrangement of the Pompeii insula notes “the network of pipes inside units may have been built in such a way that opening one tap or stopcock necessitated its closure in some other parts of the network... Had there been such a system, it required close co-operation between all parties.” (Imagine Jerry, Elaine, Kramer and George managing to pull this off successfully... unlikely.)

The building’s shared amenities included light and air from window openings, and these were formally protected under a legal arrangement known as a ‘servitude’: this tied a particular feature or basic utility to the property itself, not to the individual owner, meaning it was automatically passed on with the sale or inheritance of any apartment. If you moved into the unit with the toilet, you were obliged to let people use it. If your property had an internal light well, you could not make any changes that would stop light from reaching other units. (Having natural light was considered even more important than running water – there were public sources of water outside that you could fetch and carry if need be, but living in the dark was deemed so intolerable it was one of the few reasons a tenant could break their contract.) And while a servitude might allow a pipe to pass through one unit, it didn’t mean that the unit’s owner could tap into it. Ancient Seinfeld writes itself:

INTERIOR; DAY:

Jerry is standing in his insula; Kramer bursts through the door.

KRAMER:
He’s blocking my light, Jerry!

JERRY:
Who’s blocking your light?

KRAMER:
Newman! He’s put a curtain up in the lightwell. I can’t SEE!

JERRY:
You still stealing the water from his servitude?

KRAMER:
A man has to drink, Jerry!

Urban Lifestyle

The location of insulae, in the context of any given city, suggests the people who lived there enjoyed all the conveniences of an urban lifestyle. The city blocks surrounding the Pompeii building, for example, were home to bars and baths, grocers, fruit-, meat- and fish-sellers, carpenters, jewellers, metal-workers and retailers of household goods. People lived near where they worked, and they worked near to where they lived. We can assume that a network of social and economic ties organically evolved thanks to this physical proximity, forming the social fabric of the city.

Again, we can use a little imagination to conjure up some images of everyday life: Perhaps a baker and a cheesemonger and a tailor – who all worked out of the commercial spaces of an insula’s ground floor – closed up shop at the end of the day and had knock-off drinks together at a pub around the corner. Residents probably became friendly and familiar with the local fruit vendor, from whom they bought their fresh produce; they might have had a ‘go-to guy’ for the best salted fish in town. For main meals, many people dined out at their favourite nearby thermopolia – the ancient equivalent of a fast-food restaurant or diner. These establishments were especially popular with the working class and residents of insulae, which generally lacked their own kitchens. You pulled up at a stone counter which had large jars known as dolia embedded into it, holding hot food or refreshments like nuts, and ate with your fellow citizens while the passing elite turned their noses up at the sight of street food.

Studies into the kitchen waste and ‘mineralised excrement’ of the drains in city centres has revealed some clues about the diets of the time. Where today’s city-goers might snack on a slice of pizza or a fresh roll of sushi, the average Roman was likely to fill up on olives or lentils or local fish.

On special occasions, they might have splurged on more exotic fare, such as shellfish or imported meat flavoured with spices from lands as far away as Indonesia. One excavation even discovered the “butchered leg joint of a giraffe”.

(Let’s play Ancient Seinfeld again: Elaine is banned by the ‘Giraffe Nazi’⁹. Kramer tries to take a plate of mussels into the local baths. George has to walk the long way home to avoid a woman he stood up at a thermopolia.) The point is: the guy selling the giraffe leg doesn’t have a business if there’s no one around to eat it, and the lady wanting to buy a bag of bread rolls needs a bakery. Everyone benefited from the density, and the density fuelled the city.

Hey I'm walkin' here!

The streets of Ancient Rome's cities would have been very alive, and very busy. So busy, in fact, that traffic congestion became a serious problem, requiring the introduction of restrictions: some roads in Roman cities were entirely closed off to horse-drawn carriages or other wheeled vehicles, others were only accessible at certain times of day. Pedestrian safety and accessibility was prioritised in some densely packed areas, with large bollards placed at the end of streets to physically block access to anyone not on foot. Huge raised pavers provided elevated stepping stones for people to cross the road without dirtying their feet in wastewater. (Rome was famous for its sophisticated and extensive sewer system, but drainage wasn't exactly up to modern sanitary standards.)

These traffic-restricting measures foreshadow the congestion taxes of today, which have been introduced in some major cities, including London and New York in an effort to keep vehicles out of the inner city.

Road rage, too, appears to be a long-standing human affliction, with records of vociferous chariot and wagon drivers hurling profanity at the many frustrations and obstacles they encountered.

"…with the present importance of the city and the unlimited numbers of its population, it is necessary to increase the number of dwelling-places indefinitely. Consequently, as the ground floors could not admit of so great a number living in the city, the nature of the case has made it necessary to find relief by making the buildings high. In these tall piles reared with piers of stone, walls of burnt brick, and partitions of rubble work, and provided with floor after floor, the upper stories can be partitioned off into rooms to very great advantage. The accommodations within the city walls being thus multiplied as a result of the many floors high in the air, the Roman people easily find excellent places in which to live." – Vitruvius Pollio, De Architectura¹⁰

Still, the mere fact that the needs and comfort of people on the streets of Ancient Rome was so highly prioritised shows how fundamental walkability was to the functioning of the republic's cities, something urban planners today know well.

The '15-minute city' was the name given to this age-old concept in 2015 by the French-Colombian urbanist and professor Carlos Moreno. He was putting forth his theory that a person's quality of life in a city depends a lot on how much time is needed to be spent in transport, especially that requiring a car. The more driving or commuting you have to do for basic necessities, the worse life is. The solution, as he sees it, is better planning and urban design. A key feature is the incorporation of bike lanes and walking paths, allowing people to easily access six essential functions within a quarter hour from home: living, working, commerce, healthcare, education and entertainment. The increased sustainability of this lifestyle is an added bonus. (Bizarrely, this seemingly innocuous vision has become swept up in the conspiratorial thinking that flourished in the Covid-19 era. For some, the '15-minute city' is actually a dystopian global plan to take people's cars away, trap them in their homes and keep them under surveillance. Don't try to make sense of this. There's no sense to be made. It's really just an idea to help you spend less time sitting in traffic! Even the Romans got it!)

Still Standing

So, you are now looking around your apartment, and thinking about Ancient Rome so much you feel an overwhelming urge to book a trip there to see it all for yourself? Well, a travel tip: the best preserved example of Roman insulae is not found in Rome itself, or even in Pompeii, but in the port city of Ostia. Here, an economic and population boom during the 2nd century CE drove a spate of building activity, with a number of insulae constructed across the city. One particularly good surviving example – the Case a Giardino (Garden Houses) – was a "luxurious residential complex". Having been built of more expensive and sturdier concrete and brick than your average insula, and surrounding a large rectangular garden, it was less vulnerable to the disaster and decay that has befallen so many others from the time.

And there's a tattoo parlour just a short walk away, should you feel the urge to have a picture of Cicero inked onto your arm.

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¹ We know, we know – it’s hard to keep track of which important figures from Ancient Rome are which. Cicero was a philosopher, lawyer, scholar and politician, and widely considered one of the age’s best orators. He was also, incidentally, a landlord – owning or part-owning a number of insulae, and used the rental income from these properties to fund his son’s travels through Greece.

² It’s worth spending a moment here thinking about another Latin word: civitas. In Ancient Rome, this word was used to capture the very concept of a Roman citizen – an individual with rights and responsibilities, who is formally part of a political community. From the same root we have city, and citizen, and civics, and civilisation, and civility. Cities then, are the physical expression of human progress and collective effort. And in virtually every example we have, across time and around the world, some variation of apartment living has been the way people have lived within them. Urban centres, with small units for people to call home, are at the heart of the human story.

³ This depends a little on which historian you ask. Others consider China’s Chang’an, or Iraq’s Baghdad, as the first city of a million people.

⁴ The plebeians – the commoners, the proletariat, the man-or-woman in the street. The word is sometimes thrown around with a derogatory overtone, but really, plebs are the defining characters of any society. There should be pride in being a pleb!

⁵ Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method – first published in 1896 – is a beautifully illustrated and comprehensive classic text, with an entire chapter dedicated to Roman architecture. A new copy of the latest edition will set you back close to 1000 dollars but you can flip through every page of the digitised original online for nothing.

⁶ Generally Roman insulae were around three to five stories high. Some went up to nine stories, but eventually Emperor Augustus placed a height limit on them of about 21 metres, to address concerns about fires and collapse.

⁷ The editors say this reference needs a footnote for the ‘young folk’. If that’s you, here’s what you should know: Seinfeld was one of the greatest television sitcoms of all time. (“Television” was a screen-based broadcast media technology that people used to watch before smartphones and the internet came along.) This ‘show about nothing’ centred around four rather self-centred, somewhat eccentric New York characters, and the daily trivialities they managed to hilariously complicate their lives with. The show ran for 180 episodes from 1989 to 1998, and is now available in its entirety on Netflix. You should absolutely watch it.

⁸ The paper, titled Understanding Neighbourhood Relations through Shared Structures: Reappraising the Value of Insula-Based Studies by Heini Ynnilä, is available online and is a fascinating report on the social implications of the Pompeii insula. You should read it after you’ve watched Seinfeld.

⁹ Okay so one of the most famous Seinfeld episodes of all time is called “The Soup Nazi” (Episode 6, Season 7), in which a very strict soup vendor refuses to serve customers who in some way irk him. If you have ever heard someone say “No soup for you!”, they are referencing this episode. If you only watch one episode of Seinfeld, make it this one.

¹⁰ Vitruvius Pollio was a Roman architect, who is best known for his book De Architectura – the only known textbook on architecture to survive from antiquity.