In the more pretentious Roman houses there was sometimes a dining room for each season of the year; when Trimalchio in Petronius's novel boasts that he has four dining rooms, we are to understand that he had one each for winter, summer, autumn, and spring. In the case of the Pompeian houses we are warranted in assuming that dining rooms opening toward the south were for winter use, those toward the north for use in summer. Other airy apartments, with a large window in addition to the wide door, may well have been intended for summer triclinia. Further than this it is hardly possible to classify Pompeian dining rooms according to the seasons. IX. THE KITCHEN, THE BATH, AND THE STOREROOMS In the Pompeian house the kitchen had no fixed location. It was generally a small room, and was placed wherever it would least interfere with the arrangement of the rest of the house. The most important part of the kitchen was the hearth. This was built of masonry, against one of the walls. It was oblong, and the fire was made on the top. The cooking utensils sometimes rested on rectangular projections of masonry, as in the kitchen of the house of Pansa, sometimes on small iron tripods, as in the house of the Vettii (Fig. 125). The hearth of the latter house was found undisturbed, with a vessel in place ready to be heated. In one house the place of an iron tripod was taken by three pointed ends of amphorae set upright on the hearth. Underneath there was often a hollow place, like that shown in our illustration, in which fuel was kept, as in similar openings under the hearths of Campanian kitchens to-day. Sometimes we find near the hearth a bake oven, not large enough to have been used for bread, and evidently intended for pastry; bread must ordinarily have been obtained from the bakers. In one of the cellars of the house of the Centenary there is a larger oven, which may have been used to bake coarse bread for the slaves; the heat was utilized in warming a bath above. Over the hearth was a small window to carry off the smoke. As the kitchen was ordinarily high there may have been a hole in the roof also, but the upper parts have been destroyed, and their arrangement cannot be determined. From the small size of the kitchens and of the hearths in even the largest and finest houses, we may infer that the luxury of the table prevalent in the Early Empire had made only slight progress at Pompeii. Close by the kitchen, frequently forming a part of it and next to the hearth, was the closet; a separate closet of good size is found in the houses of the Faun and of Castor and Pollux. [Illustration: Fig. 125.--Hearth of the kitchen in the house of the Vettii. The arched place underneath is for the storage of fuel.]