Last Supper in Pompeii

4 June 2026 at 09:30:00

Moor Park Mansion, Rickmansworth

Booking closes

28 May 2026

Roman seafood mosaic c. 100 BC

BOOKING FOR THIS EVENT WILL OPEN IN FEBRUARY 2026

For the Romans, life meant getting together to eat and drink, in a pub, in a simple flat or at a banquet in a triclinium or grand dining room. Today's Discovery Day celebrates the Roman love affair with food and wine, in a journey from fields and vineyards to markets and shops, from tables to toilets and the tomb.

We visit the fertile vine-filled slopes of Vesuvius, then going into the bustling city, past shops and bars, we enter the home, with its grand reception rooms, and lovely garden filled with flowers and fountains. We recline in the dining room, with exotic food and fine wine, surrounded by Greek-style luxury; beautiful silver, mosaics and frescoes.

But don’t go in the kitchen! No fridge, no running water, no hygiene (and an open cess pit next to the cooker!).

Lastly we look at how Roman ideas and customs on food caught on in Roman Britain. Along with Roman gods of fertility and wine come exotic imports like pepper, figs and finest fish sauce. We witness the birth of the British beer industry and even see the British dead, feasting into the afterlife, like all good Romans. It's definitely a case of 'Carpe diem' - Seize the day!

FIND VENUE

Our Speaker

Paul Roberts

Dr Paul Roberts is Research Keeper in the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford University. He has been a lecturer with the Arts Society for over twenty years, has travelled extensively to societies across the UK, and has also lectured on numerous cruises in and around the Mediterranean.

He studied Classics at the University of Cambridge, and Classical Archaeology at the Universities of Sheffield and Oxford. He then lived in Italy for several years, teaching and researching. He has travelled throughout the former lands of the Roman Empire, from Britain to Syria, and has excavated in Britain, Greece, Libya, Turkey and in particular Italy, where he is currently working on a Roman Villa in the Molise region of the Central Apennines.

His research focuses on the daily life of ordinary people in the Greek and Roman worlds, and he has written books and articles on Greek and Roman daily life, Pompeii and Herculaneum, Sicily, Roman Emperors, mummy portraits, and Greek and Roman ceramics and glass. He is now writing a history of Rome through its monuments and the Emperors who built them.

From 1994 to 2015 he was Senior Roman Curator in the Greek and Roman Department at the British Museum, where he curated the exhibition Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum (2013). Arriving in the Ashmolean Museum Oxford in 2015, in 2019/20 he curated Last Supper in Pompeii, a tribute to the Roman love affair with food and wine.

In May 2022 Paul was appointed Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Stella d’Italia (Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy) by the Italian Ambassador on behalf of the Italian State. In November 2023 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.