Who would have thought that high-rise buildings were built in Pompeii. These were real city estates and tabernas - housing for the proletariat.
Two floors were a common practice for sure - this is often indicated by the preserved upper parts of the second floor, stairs and traces from them going up, as well as the interiors and objects that fell from above to the first floors when destroyed.
Many have also seen the reconstruction of the "half-timbered balcony". Perhaps someone went on an excursion to the Quarter of Tender Lovers, and if they did not go, they definitely saw its monumental facade with columns on the Street of Plenty.
Some of the properties went deep into the ground - the underground floor can be considered cryptoporticas, as, for example, in the House of Cryptoporticus or in the Villa of Diomedes.
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In houses located on the outskirts of the landscape - that is, overlooking the sea and the Sarn River, above the city walls, one could afford to build not only the floors of a house going underground, as in the Sarnos Terme, but also tier gardens - like, for example, in the House of Geometric Mosaics or the House of Fabius Rufus.
By the way, about the Sarnos Baths: in this complex there were, possibly, up to 6 floors, of which the couple went underground, and the uppermost - hypothetical - was wooden.
Even the Civil Forum was two-story. You can be convinced of this by paying attention to the reconstructed fragment of the second tier of the colonnade, as well as to the preserved stone stairs - at the Mensa Ponderaria (Chamber of Weights and Measures) and on the Shkola Street.
As for the tabern, it is assumed that these premises on the facades of large domus could have belonged to the owners of urban estates and leased to artisans or service workers. The second floor in such a tabern where the tenant lived could, in fact, be just a mezzanine - note the height of the holes for the beams in Pompeii or the reconstruction of such a mezzanine in Herculaneum.
Sometimes a separate staircase led to the second floor above the tabernaya, and then the premises on the second floor could be rented out separately from the tabern, and under such a staircase, for example, a toilet could be arranged.
Therefore, when we walk through the one-story Pompeii in its modern state, we do not forget to finish drawing one or two more floors in our heads in order to assess the real integrity of this provincial town of the Roman Empire of the 1st century AD.