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The Domus dei Dolia is the largest dwelling unit found to date within the Hellenistic-age urban quarter unearthed between 1892 and 1895 by the physician-archaeologist Isidoro Falchi at Poggiarello Renzetti in Vetulonia. With its 500 square meters of extension, the dwelling outlines the northeastern profile of the insula between the so-called "Cyclops" street and the perpendicular "Temple" street unearthed during the first of ten excavation campaigns conducted in the ancient quarter between 2009 and 2019. What reappears today among the remains of the ancient quarter is a domus "a cavaedium," according to the most recent definition coined by Vincent Jolivet, which since 2011 has replaced the one already known in the literature of the house "ad atrium," that is, a dwelling erected on a quadrangular plan that has its roots in the same territory of the Maremma grossetana in the most genuine tradition of Etruscan housing to reach the model widely attested in the entire Peninsula and known as Etruscan-Italic or "Pompeian" house.
The exceptional state of preservation of the domus, particularly with regard to its southern half, excavated close to the hillside, has made it possible to read clearly in this very part the original structure of the dwelling, which, articulated in four rooms aligned paratactically against the back wall of the same and open to an atrium provided with a well-cistern combined with a porticoed space, seems to repeat the model elaborated in Greek lands and widespread in the Magna Graecia area and in Pompeii itself of the house "a "pastas," kept alive in the first of the two main macrophases of the house's life, which over a period of almost two centuries, from the beginning of the 3rd to the third quarter of the 2nd century BC. C., includes four minor ones.
It is the tragic event dictated by the destruction by fire of the house and of the entire urban quarter of Poggiarello Renzetti, perpetrated at the hands of the Sillan troops to the detriment of the Etruscan cities aligned with Marius, that gives us back the last face assumed by the domus between the last quarter of the second and the first quarter of the first century B.C., in the second and last macrophase of the life of the dwelling. A face that knows by the will of the owners a change of pace that is nothing short of spectacular, with the symmetrical duplication of residential and service spaces in the northern half of the house, now provided with two entrances on the two streets joined at perpendicular "of the Cyclopes" and "of the Temple."
And, together with the planimetric revolution, it knows a complete "make up" of the rooms and their intimate vocation, evident, first of all, in the marked emphasis of the tablinum, clearly distinguished from the other rooms and placed in axis with the new access from the main street at the bottom of a large open space-peristyle bordered by a portico and embellished by the lively pictorial polychromy dictated by the red and yellow ochres that form the rectangle motifs of the "first style" that adorns the walls and by the bright red floor surface where the meander motifs designed in white and gray by the stone tesserae inserted like gems in the weave of a "carpet" stand out.
Stories of men and environments, of their days and their works, parade uninterruptedly before the eyes of the beholder, narrating the vicissitudes of the places "ofotium" and of productive activities, the architectural and conceptual evolution of the places of work, of those of receiving and dining, of those of devotion and the practices of worship. Stories without space and without time told through a context of exception, flourished in a city that in the encounter between two civilizations, the Etruscan and the Roman, knew how to give voice and soul to its unrepeatable History.
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