One of the grandest private residences in Herculaneum, the House of the Mosaic Atrium takes its name from the spectacular geometric black-and-white mosaic that covers the floor of its central atrium and side corridors. The tesserae are still in place, buckled slightly by the pyroclastic flow but otherwise intact — a remarkable survival for a floor laid in the first century AD.
The house belonged to a wealthy family and extends to a garden terrace facing the sea, with a cryptoporticus (a vaulted underground corridor) that helped keep the rooms cool in summer. The quality of the decoration throughout — painted plaster, fine stonework, the scale of the rooms — gives a vivid sense of how prosperous Herculaneum's upper class had become by the time Vesuvius ended it.