It’s easy to picture ancient Rome as a world of marble, togas, and public baths, but everyday life had its practical infrastructure too, and laundry was one of them. Romans didn’t rely only on household washing: in towns and cities, they had professional laundries called fullonicae, run by fullones (fullers), where people could take garments to be cleaned, brightened, and finished for a fee. In other words, Rome had a dedicated “lavanderia” trade with its own spaces, tools, and routines.
Pompeii gives the clearest snapshot of how this worked, because several fullonicae survived there in recognizable form. One of the most famous is the so-called Fullonica of Stephanus, a busy, efficient workshop, thanks to which we learned a lot about laundry practices in those times.
