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The latest excavations in Pompeii have revealed how a family desperately tried to hide from the eruption that killed the Roman city’s inhabitants and left many frozen in time.

During the excavation, the remains of at least four individuals were found, including a child.

A bed had been moved to block the bedroom door to protect the family from the eruption.

“Excavating and visiting Pompeii means coming face to face with the beauty of art but also with the precariousness of our lives,” says the Director of the Park, Gabriel Zuchtriegel. “In this small, wonderfully decorated house we found traces of the inhabitants who tried to save themselves, blocking the entrance to a small room with a bed.”

The house of Elle and Frisso along Via del Vesuvio is named after the mythological painting found in one of the rooms.

The main rooms excavated are the atrium with an impluvium (water collection basin), a bedroom (cubiculum), a banquet hall (triclinium) with richly decorated walls, and a room with a roof and an opening in the centre for the passage of rainwater.

It is precisely this opening that may have allowed rock fragments to rain down inside the house during the first phases of the eruption.

One of the victims had tried to protect themselves by taking refuge in a room, barred with a bed. Archaeologists used a cast to recreate the bed, having identified in the solidified ash some voids formed by the organic decomposition of the wood. Plaster was poured inside the voids to reconstruct the shape of the bed preserved as an imprint in the ash.

A bronze pendant, thought to belong to the child, was found, as was a type of amulet worn by male children until they reached adulthood.

Among the various other objects found were amphorae, stored in a basement used as a pantry, some of which were used to contain garum, a Roman fish sauce; and a set of bronze pottery, consisting of a ladle, a single-handled jug, a basket vase and a shell-shaped cup.

The absence of decoration in some places and traces of cut masonry in the entrance of the house, suggest it was undergoing renovation work at the time of the eruption.

However, it continued to be occupied by its inhabitants who, struck by the eruption, preferred not to leave the house, dying there.

“The volcanic stones entered through the opening in the roof of the atrium,” Zuchtriegel adds. “They didn't make it, in the end the pyroclastic flow arrived, a violent flow of very hot ash that filled here, as elsewher.e, every room”

The mythological painting that gives the house its name was in the central panel of a wall of the triclinium. It depicts Phrixus riding the Chrysomallo and his sister Helle shortly before drowning. The myth tells that Helle and Phrixus saved themselves from Ino's persecution by flying on the back of a ram with a golden fleece but, during the journey, Helle fell into the sea which thus took the name of Hellespont.
The fresco depicts the tragic moment of the girl's death as she holds out her hand to her brother for help.

The scientific insights on this recent excavation were published on Wednesday in the e E-Journal of the Pompeii excavations.