Bakery and Vicolo Storto, Pompei

One of Pompeii’s largest bakeries is located in the Vicolo Storto area, a narrow, winding alleyway known for its dense commercial activity. The building is one of a remarkable thirty-five mills and bakeries discovered in the ruins of Pompeii; together, they give us an exceptionally detailed and unique insight into the advanced milling industry of the Roman Empire. Because few private dwellings had the proper facilities to bake bread, the vast majority of citizens relied daily on these commercial bakeries to buy their staple food.

The machinery used to produce bread here included heavy millstones, formed from volcanic igneous rock, which were turned by mules or donkeys. Grain was poured into an hourglass-shaped funnel at the top and crushed between the spinning stones. While this layout was standard across the empire, larger economic hubs such as Rome and Ostia Antica operated massive commercial bakeries on an even larger scale. These mills were notoriously brutal places to work; the Roman author Apuleius vividly recorded the extreme hardships of the slaves and blinded animals put to work in them, while the famous playwright Plautus similarly wrote about the struggles of life in the mill, based on his own early days working in a bakery.