Pecunia non olet. Convivere con le esalazioni artigianali nelle città tardoantiche

Artisanal workshops played a significant role in contaminating the environment with unpleasant and unhealthy by-products, such as industrial fumes. Olfactory pollution could deeply affect air quality and was highly distressing to human senses, as attested by written sources from the Republican and Early Imperial periods. Naturally, its degree of annoyance largely depended on the proximity of factories to residential areas: therefore, foul odors were particularly hard to control in densely populated urban centers, where manufacturing activities were in close proximity to private homes and communal spaces. Although olfactory nuisances have been recognized for centuries, it is primarily through later sources that regulations relating to production sites are known. Among these, Julian of Ascalon’s Treatise stands out as the most valuable document addressing the issue of bad odors within the city and establishing building construction standards to mitigate them. However, the architectural solutions proposed by the author, which convey the image of a well-planned urban environment, seem to contradict the unpleasant districts depicted in juristic and literary writings. The scarcity of further explicit written information on the topic calls for a turn to archaeological evidence in order to reconstruct the olfactory environment of Late Antique cities. From this perspective, some significant urban cases across the Mediterranean Basin will be examined to demonstrate that the issue of artisanal foul odors in inhabited areas may have been a matter of habit.