Pompeii excavation reveals large private bathhouse built 2,000 years ago

Archeologists in Pompeii, the ancient Roman city buried by ash and lava in 70 AD, unearthed a private bathhouse built over 2,000 years ago, officials said Friday.

The discovery includes sumptuous mosaics and is equipped with a series of hot, warm and cold rooms and a huge plunge pool in the manner of a spa.

“We have here perhaps the largest thermal complex in a private house in Pompeii,” said Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Pompeii archaeological park. “The members of the ruling class of Pompeii set up enormous spaces in their homes to host banquets.”

The spa-like baths were unearthed in the so-called Regio IX, a central area of Pompeii park still unexplored, where major archaeological excavations are revealing new aspects of Pompeians’ daily life.

“It’s these spaces that really are part of the ‘Pompeii effect’ — it’s almost as if the people had only left a minute ago,” Zuchtriegel told CBS News partner BBC News.

Zuchtriegel said wealthy habitants of Pompeii often used first to take a bath and then to have a banquet, so the private spa complex allowed to do that altogether inside the same house.

“There is room for about 30 people who could do the whole routine, and that could also be done in public baths. So there is the calidarium, a very warm environment and also a large tub with cold water,” he said.

Recently, archeologists working in the same area found a bakery, a laundry shop, two villas and the bones of three people who died during the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which destroyed both the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The bodies belonged to a woman, who was clutching jewelry and coins, and a young man in his teens or early 20s, the BBC reported.

“The pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius came along the street just outside this room, and caused a wall to collapse, and that had basically crushed him to death,” Sophie Hay, an archaeologist at Pompeii, told the BBC. “The woman was still alive while he was dying — imagine the trauma — and then this room filled with the rest of the pyroclastic flow, and that’s how she died.”