DOMUS NAUTARUM
The Sailors’ House · Inn / Boarding House (Quality) · Quartum Nautarum, Portus Novae Romae
"The Domus Nautarum has better beds than the Anchor and worse conversations. This is not a criticism. A place where people sleep well is doing its job. The harbour needs both kinds of establishment."
The Domus Nautarum is the Sailors’ Quarter’s quality establishment: not luxurious by the standards of the city’s inner districts, but the best accommodation available in the harbour for someone who can afford to pay for clean sheets, a private room, and a bath that is reliably hot. It occupies a corner building two streets back from the Via Cauponum, far enough from the waterfront to be quiet at night and close enough to be convenient at any hour. It caters to a clientele of ships’ captains, senior officers, successful independent traders, and the occasional person of non-maritime profession who has arrived in the harbour district for reasons they have chosen not to explain and who can pay the Domus Nautarum’s rates, which are the clearest signal in the Sailors’ Quarter that you are not dealing with someone short of funds.
The Domus Nautarum is run by Titus Hospitarius Nauta, sixty-six, who inherited the establishment from his father and has been running it for thirty-one years. He is a man who considers discretion the primary qualification for his profession and who has spent thirty-one years perfecting it. He knows considerably more about his guests than they imagine and says considerably less about them than he knows.
Purpose / Function
Quality short-stay and extended accommodation for the harbour’s more prosperous transient population. The Domus Nautarum’s primary distinction from the Sailors’ Quarter’s other licensed boarding houses is threefold: private rooms with locks that work, a bathhouse that is hot twice daily, and a level of staff discretion that Titus enforces through the simple mechanism of employing people who understand that a guest’s business is the guest’s business and that their continued employment depends on this principle being maintained. The Domus Nautarum does not have a back room. It does not need one: all its rooms are private.
Design
A substantial three-storey building organised around a central courtyard that provides light and air to the interior rooms and that the Domus Nautarum’s guests use as a sitting area when the weather permits. The courtyard’s fountain — a practical piece of plumbing rather than a decorative statement, fed by the same Aqua Magna connection that serves the bathhouse — is the detail that distinguishes the Domus Nautarum most immediately from the other boarding houses: running water in the courtyard is not typical of the Sailors’ Quarter and marks this establishment as operating at a different standard. The front entrance faces away from the waterfront, onto a quieter street that the Domus Nautarum’s guests use as additional privacy from the Via Cauponum’s traffic.
Sensory & Appearance
The Domus Nautarum’s distinctive quality is what it does not sound like: quiet, by the Sailors’ Quarter’s standards, the waterfront’s noise attenuated by two streets’ distance and the courtyard’s stone walls. The courtyard’s fountain is audible from every room whose window faces the interior, which in the Sailors’ Quarter is an unusual sound — the Anchor has the harbour, the Three Masts has the Via Cauponum, and the Domus Nautarum has running water in a stone courtyard. Regular guests describe the transition from the harbour’s working noise to the Domus Nautarum’s courtyard as the specific physical sensation of stopping moving. Titus considers this the highest compliment the establishment receives and does not share it with guests.
Denizens
Titus Hospitarius Nauta , sixty-six, thirty-one years running the establishment. The cipher register. The meal-hour coordination. The two guests who do not overlap in the courtyard. Titus is the Domus Nautarum’s most significant asset and the one least visible to anyone who interacts with him, because he has spent thirty-one years becoming a person that guests notice as little as possible while being completely attended to. Players who need information about who has stayed at the Domus Nautarum will find Titus politely, consistently, impenetrably discreet. They will also find that his observation of the current guests’ behaviour has produced, in his own assessment, a situation he has not previously managed, and that he is considering what to do about it.
Valuables
The cipher register: thirty-one years of significant arrivals in a code only Titus can read. He has never been asked to produce it as evidence and has prepared, mentally, for the day when he is. The preparation involves a version of the register that he would produce: the same format, the same handwriting, a selection of the guests who would not object to being identified. The actual register is under the floorboards of the reception room. This is not a recent precaution. It was the first thing his father told him when he inherited the establishment.
History
The Domus Nautarum was established in the seventh century by a ships’ captain who retired from the Inland Sea run and invested his accumulated earnings in the best corner he could find two streets back from the waterfront. The establishment has passed within the same professional network rather than the same family for most of its history: Titus’s father purchased it from a retiring manager who had purchased it from the previous owner, each transition conducted between people who understood what the Domus Nautarum was and were qualified to maintain it. The bathhouse’s Aqua Magna connection was added in the ninth century and is the establishment’s most significant infrastructure investment and, in the view of everyone who has used it after three weeks on the river, its most significant distinguishing feature.
Access
Reception open at all hours.
Guest rooms: private, keyed.
Courtyard: guests only.
Bathhouse: guests only, hot water twice daily.
Rooms Available
22 rooms total. 16 currently occupied. 6 available.
Upper floor eastern rooms: quietest, preferred by guests with professional reasons to value silence.
All rooms: private lock, proper bed, sea chest storage.
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