Herculaneum Archaeological Park

Herculaneum Archaeological Park, at Ercolano in Campania, preserves a smaller but far better-conserved Roman town than neighbouring Pompeii. When Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, Herculaneum was engulfed not by ash but by a series of fast-moving, high-temperature pyroclastic surges that carbonised and sealed organic materials, then set into a hard tufa up to 20 metres deep. As a result, wooden beams, doors, furniture, roofs and even foodstuffs survive here in ways they do not elsewhere. The town, a prosperous seaside resort favoured by wealthy Romans, was rediscovered in 1709 and excavated by tunnelling under the Bourbons before open-air excavation in the modern era. Visitors descend from the modern town into the sunken site and walk grid-planned streets lined with two-storey houses. The House of the Wooden Partition retains its original sliding wooden screen; the House of the Stags is named for marble sculptures of deer attacked by hounds; the House of Neptune and Amphitrite preserves a brilliant glass-paste wall mosaic in a summer dining room. The Suburban Baths, the College of the Augustales with its frescoes, and the elegant thermal complexes show the town's affluence. Along the ancient shoreline, the boat chambers of the old waterfront held the skeletal remains of around 300 fugitives who died awaiting rescue, a discovery from the 1980s that reshaped understanding of the eruption's victims. The Villa of the Papyri, source of a unique carbonised library of Greek philosophical scrolls now being read with imaging technology, lies partly beneath the modern town. Conservation has been led since 2001 by the Herculaneum Conservation Project in partnership with the heritage authorities, addressing groundwater and decay. Presented largely in situ and at a human scale, the compact site can be appreciated in two to three hours and offers an unusually intimate sense of a Roman town's interiors.