The distinctive red of Roman wall paintings — achieved with cinnabar (mercury sulfide) or red ochre. The Pompeii excavations revealed these colours preserved under volcanic ash, giving the world a direct window into Roman colour culture.

Pompeian red is ancient, warm, and grounding. It carries the weight of millennia — the colour of empire, domestic comfort, and civilisation buried and recovered. Neither aggressive nor retiring.

The House of the Vettii in Pompeii features the most spectacular surviving examples of this red. Thomas Jefferson used Pompeian red in Monticello's interior design. The colour directly influenced 18th and 19th-century Neoclassical interior decoration across Europe and America.