A Day of Work, Water and Rest in Rome, AD 117

Rome, AD 117. What might one working day have looked like beyond emperors and monuments? Follow an unnamed shoemaker through one plausible day in the Subura: a rented home, water carried into the household, work with ordinary footwear, a modest meal, a walk to the Baths of Trajan, and a return home. The film is a historically constrained reconstruction—not a diary, a documented biography or a claim about how every Roman lived. The man's identity, wife, address, shop, exact schedule, customer, conversations and small street route are selected reconstruction. Public water distribution, urban shops and housing, food and footwear evidence, and the Baths of Trajan provide the broader historical setting. The bath complex was already open by AD 117; its exact appearance and this visitor's precise path through it are not fully recoverable. Chapters: 0:00 Rome, AD 117: one plausible day 0:48 Home at first light 1:35 Water for the household 2:30 Opening the shoemaker's workshop 3:11 A customer and an exchange 3:44 Food during work 4:25 Sanitation and the household 5:06 Closing work and walking uphill 5:40 The Baths of Trajan 6:36 Provisions and return home 7:32 What this one day can show Research note: The reconstruction draws on Martial's reference to shoemakers near the Argiletum; Frontinus's account of Rome's public water distribution; Roman housing, footwear, food and household-object evidence; and the archaeological record of the Baths of Trajan. Literary sources are not treated as a census of ordinary lives, and comparative objects are not presented as this family's possessions. The project retains a full annotated bibliography; no exact wages, prices, fountain, route or bath circuit is asserted here.