Fig. 138.—Part of the cornice over the large front door.
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In front of the main entrance we read the word HAVE (more commonly written ave), 'Welcome!' spelled in the sidewalk with bits of green, yellow, red, and white marble. The street door here, quite exceptionally, was at the outer end of the vestibule. It consisted of three leaves (seen in [Fig. 139]) and opened toward the inside, while the double door between the vestibule and the fauces (A on the plan) opened toward the outside; the closed vestibule was not unlike those of many modern houses. Fragments of the lintel over the outer door, with its projecting dentil cornice, are preserved in one of the shops ([Fig. 138]).

The shops with their upper floors, pergulae, were nineteen feet high. When the shutters were up they presented a monotonous appearance ([Fig. 139]), but on sunny days, when the articles offered for sale were attractively displayed, and buyers and idlers were loitering in front or leisurely passing from one to the other, shops and street alike were full of color and animation.

Fig. 139.—Façade of the house of the Faun, restored.
At the left, the front of a shop (1 on the plan) with its upper floor; then the large front door, two shops, the entrance of the smaller atrium and the fourth shop, which, like the second, is completely closed by shutters.
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The floor of the fauces, as of many of the other rooms, is rich in color. It is made of small triangular pieces of marble and slate—red, yellow, green, white, and black. At the inner end it was marked off from the floor of the atrium by a stripe of finely executed mosaic, suggestive of a threshold ([Fig. 140]), now in the Naples Museum. Two tragic masks are realistically outlined, appearing in the midst of fruits, flowers, and garlands, the details of which are worked out with much skill.