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Casa del Mitreo, 'the House of the Mithraeum' is a house built at the end of the 1st century and the beginning of the 2nd century AC outside the Mérida city walls. Its size and the decoration of some of its rooms undoubtedly show that its owners were people of Hellenistic culture who were important within the society of Mérida.
The whole building is set up around three courtyards. You enter the first one through a stairway and you arrive onto a tetra style atrium with a pond to collect water, the impluvium. It seems that this area, like other areas in the house, had a second floor because of the steps that are still preserved. Several rooms come out onto this atrium, built like other ones in the house: a masonry base and the rest of the wall in rammed earth. The walls were plastered and decorated with paintings.
One of these rooms preserves the mosaic of the Cosmos. It represents a colourful and realistic mixed group of human figures that represent the different elements of the known universe, going from terrestrial and marine elements until celestial elements, but they all revolve around the essential figure of Eternity (Aeternitas).
References:Saint-Georges de Boscherville Abbey is a former Benedictine abbey. It was founded in about 1113 by Guillaume de Tancarville on the site of an earlier establishment of secular canons and settled by monks from the Abbey of Saint-Evroul. The abbey church made of Caumont stone was erected from 1113 to 1140. The Norman builders aimed to have very well-lit naves and they did this by means of tall, large windows, initially made possible by a wooden ceiling, which prevented uplift, although this was replaced by a Gothic vault in the 13th century. The chapter room was built after the abbey church and dates from the last quarter of the 12th century.
The arrival of the Maurist monks in 1659, after the disasters of the Wars of Religion, helped to get the abbey back on a firmer spiritual, architectural and economic footing. They erected a large monastic building one wing of which fitted tightly around the chapter house (which was otherwise left as it was).