It has long been held that the world of the Roman fullo was first and foremost a rather smelly affair, and that the malodorous nature of their businesses meant that fullones faced serious challenges in negotiating their social position, or were even obliged to conduct their work in the periphery of the city so that they would not disturb civic live with the smell of rotten urine. In the 1930s Mima Maxey claimed that fulleries were a ‘public nuisance to some extent’ (1938, p. 37). More recently, in his provocative article on the cultural posi- tion of the Roman fullonica, Mark Bradley has argued that fulleries stank, and were ‘proverbially unpleasant places to be around’ (2002, p. 35). Similar ideas can be found in the work of Fridolf Kudlien, who refers to the ‘ gesellschaftliche Ambivalenz’ of fulling in his work on Lucius Patulcius, the fuller who became Proboulos in Magnesia on the Maeander (Kudlien, 2002, p. 58). Likewise, Andrew Wilson suggested that the fulleries at Timgad were concentrated in a remote corner of the city so that their smells would be blown away from the city centre walls by the prevailing winds (2000, p. 280). Nevertheless, while some of the chemicals used in the fulling process brought nasty smells with them, it is clear that this did not impede fulleries, and sometimes rather large ones, to be built in the middle of cities like Pompeii and Ostia. Their business did not impede fullones from developing clearly defined and public occu- pational statuses, nor did it prevent them from playing a central and visible role in many urban communities throughout the Roman world, as is attested by the many inscriptions left by their professional associations in the cities of, particularly, Roman Italy and Asia Minor (see Flohr, 2013a, pp. 322–46). Moreover, a great deal of the literary evidence supposedly associating fullones with bad smells, or a bad reputation, on closer inspection presents a much more nuanced picture than past scholars have tried to sketch (Flohr, 2013a, pp. 185–6). Indeed, if we want to analyse the cultural and social positions of full- ers and their work in Roman urban communities, or rather the way in which these were shaped by the work they actually did, we cannot afford to stick to our noses: we need to bring in the other senses as well. The present chapter aims to do precisely this: to evaluate the work done by fullers from a multisensory perspective, and to discuss how this impacted on Beyond smell The sensory landscape of the Roman fullonica Miko Flohr 3