← Back to the map 18th-century engraving of two putti at a Roman workbench, copied from a fresco discovered at Herculaneum

18th-century engraving after a Herculaneum fresco · Wikimedia Commons

Herculaneum

Name: Herculaneum
Address: Italy

Italia · Roman province·Italy·Founded 6th c. BCE

Buried by Vesuvius 38 years before this map's 117 CE snapshot. Shown here from its excavated ruins, not as a living city of the empire.

Coastal resort town buried by Vesuvius. Wood, papyri, and food survived under 20m of pyroclastic mud.

Only partly excavated; the modern town of Ercolano sits atop much of the unexcavated remains, UNESCO-listed jointly with Pompeii.

Excavation history

1709

Prince Emmanuel Maurice d'Elbeuf — After a farmer digging a well hit marble fragments, d'Elbeuf tunneled into the spot and, without realizing it, began looting the stage building of Herculaneum's Roman theatre.

1750-1765

Karl Weber (Swiss military engineer, under Bourbon patronage) — Tunneled through the site and produced the first accurate floor plan of the Villa of the Papyri, recording find-spots archaeologists still reference today.

1752-1754

Karl Weber's excavation team — Recovered roughly 1,800 carbonized papyrus scroll fragments from the Villa of the Papyri — the only library to survive intact from classical antiquity.

2001-present

Herculaneum Conservation Project (Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, with the Packard Humanities Institute and British School at Rome) — A public-private conservation partnership launched in 2001 that has spent roughly 20 million euros stabilizing the site and reversing decades of decay.

Notable finds

Resting Hermes

Diggers tunneling into the Villa of the Papyri in 1758 recovered this bronze Hermes caught mid-pause, one sandal barely touching a rock beneath him.

Naples National Archaeological Museum

Drunken Satyr

This bronze satyr, sprawled on a lion skin in a pose of total intoxication, once decorated the pool at the center of the Villa of the Papyri's peristyle garden.

Naples National Archaeological Museum

Bronze Runners

A pair of bronze athletes, frozen mid-sprint with fists clenched, once lined the same Villa of the Papyri gardens that gave up the site's famous library of scrolls.

Naples National Archaeological Museum

Herculaneum Papyri

Over 1,800 carbonized papyrus scrolls turned up in the Villa of the Papyri's library, the only intact library to survive from the ancient world, still being unrolled and read today with X-ray imaging.

Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, with further scrolls at the Institut de France, the Bodleian Libraries, and the British Library

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