Le pitture del complesso dei Riti Magici (II 1, 11-12) a Pompei

The PRAEDIA Project (“Pompeian Residential Architecture. Environmental, Digital, and Interdisciplinary Archive”) is an ongoing collaboration (since 2016) among Parco Archeologico di Pompei, Università di Pisa, Scuola IMT Alti Studi di Lucca and Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), with the aim of deeping the knowledge of domestic buildings in the Regio II in Pompeii, through multidisciplinary research. Since 2021, the focus of the research has been a building in Via di Nocera – the so-called “Complesso dei Riti Magici”. This building should have hosted a cult of the god Sabatius, during its last phase, as two bronze hands and ceramic vessels with appliques can testify. The building was decorated with wall paintings spanning from the first to the fourth Pompeian style, a proof of the long life and the multiple building phases of the complex. The paper aims to an exhaustive description of the painted decorations, thus updating the old information through a new campaign of photographs and data collecting in every room, with a special focus on room (3) of the civic 12, decorated with panels with still lives in the upper part of the walls. Beyond the walls of the room (3), other paintings in different rooms will be described, less known, either published or not: among them, the first style decorations in room (9), the fourth style decorations with yellow background and white embroidery borders in room (6) and the unpublished decorations with dripping on yellow background must be cited. The general aim of the paper will be a new analysis of painting decorations in the Complesso dei Riti Magici, compared to other vesuvian objects which can be helpful in the contextualization of this building in the Regio II in Pompeii.