Thanks to its innate characteristics and, in particular, its extraordinary level of conservation, Pompeii is an inexhaustible source of information for the study of the ancient Roman city, of the management and exploitation of spaces, of the forms of dwelling and living. A well-known feature of the Campanian city is the abundance of workshops, places were goods were crafted and sold: shops and workshops occupy the ground floors of all the main streets, but also the small alleys of the city. An interesting characteristic of this fervent commercial life of Pompeii is the presence of many places of craftsmanship even inside the houses themselves, in the peristyles, in the atriums, in the gardens.

The panel we propose aims to analyse the management and exploitation of space in domestic architecture when production and commercial systems are installed within of it. In order to examine this specific topic, it is imperative to consider it within the wider frame of the Pompeian context, as it is the one that more than others preserves even the most fleeting traces of the use of spaces in ancient times. In fact, while some productions, such as those of bakeries or fullonicae, require systems with complex structures, for others there is no need to alter the private buildings, making their recognition much more difficult.

We would like to develop the topic by following diverse paths: first we would like to consider the production installations located in residential buildings, investigating the environments in which they are inserted (peristyles, gardens, atriums, etc.) and how their insertion modifies these spaces. We would expect to recognise the relationships between these places of production and those of
sale, starting from the contexts in which a coexistence of the two functions can be identified. We will then proceed to those where instead the two functions are clearly separated in space. A significant aspect will be the archaeological methods at our disposal for recognising these places of production and for identifying their more specific features. This will make it possible to analyse and compare not only the contexts in which the workshops are clearly attested at a structural level, but also in those cases where the primary information comes from epigraphic or archaeometric data.The topic of the papers will therefore range from the analysis of these plants, to every type of production identified in the city of Pompeii: from textile production (officinae tinctoriae and fullonicae) to foodstuffs (pistrina, production of garum) and luxury goods (perfumes and flower cultivation).

Today these productive and commercial activities are the subject of specific studies by numerous international teams. For the selection of contributors we therefore chose scholars who had already worked on different types of productions in Pompeii. This is to recognize the strategies implemented by the ancients in each case and trace the common or specific needs of each production. We also chose not to limit the interventions to the city in 79 AD (the time of the eruption of Vesuvius) but rather to expand it to the entire history of the city, with the aim to provide a diachronic vision. Finally, we have strongly sought contributors with different approaches to the subject and coming from different European universities,to produce the best stimulating dialogue on a topic that has been only partially covered so far, but which has recently draw new attention.