Since Samnite period (425 - 80 B.C.) the Pompeians commemorated their parents defunct with the rite of the burial. In the Roman period (80 B.C.) the Pompeians necropolises become monumental for the grandeur of the mausoleums that were unwound along the roads out of the city boundaries.
It prevails in this period the funeral rite of the incineration; the ashes, prepared in terracotta, marble or glass urns, were put in monumental graves in Hellenistic and Roman style; they had the shape of niche, room, little temple, circular mausoleum, platform, altar, circular exedra (schola), or funeral triclinium.
In the Roman world, when someone died, the parents accompanied him in procession as far as the last stay, dressing black or dark suits (toga pulla).
Next the place of the burial it was consumed a meal symbolically offered to the gods and to the dead one, but it also had a cathartical function for the family and the friends contaminated by the funeral accompaniment.
The variety of the funeral architecture of the Pompeian necropolis doesn't find some comparison in the necropolises of other cities of Campania; this testifies the extreme difference of tastes and social extraction of the citizens of Pompeii.