Villa of the Papyri

Villa of the Papyri

The most famous excavated villa at Herculaneum is the “Villa of the Papyri”, which took its name from the approximately 1,800 papyri found in the only library surviving intact from antiquity.

The villa was accidently rediscovered in 1738 during the opening of a well, and for several years people tunnelled through the villa to remove works of art. The tunnellers threw away carbonised blocks of earth, thought to be charcoal. Only after the discovery of the library in 1752 was it realised that they were actually discarding the remains of books.

Using a computerised technique, the ink was made legible and hundreds of lost works of Greek philosophy — including half of Epicurus’ entire opus, which had been missing for 2,300 years, and some Roman poetry — were retrieved and could be read for the first time. In the past, several attempts to unroll numerous scrolls caused numerous onesto be damaged. An alternative technique, using X-rays, was tried in 2009, but the carbon-based inks that the Roman writers used made the text invisible to the scans. Today, the majority of the scrolls that have been discovered are stored at the National Library in Naples. In the 1990s excavators determined that, during the eruption, slaves working in the villa had been trying to carry crates of books to safety. Meanwhile, other first-time discoveries continue on the site: in 2006 the first complete painted statue ever found, the bust of an Amazon warrior, was unearthed from near the Basilica.In 1970, Jean Paul Getty, who was the wealthiest person in the world at the time, decided to build a museum in Malibu, California, modeled after the Villa of the Papyri. Due to the J.P. Getty endowment, it soon became the wealthiest private museum in the world.

In 2006 the museum spent $275 million to renovate the villa in order to house the antiquities collection alone, while the rest of the collections were kept at the Getty Centre. Soon after that, more than 41 antiquity masterpieces that had been exhibited at the Getty were proven to have been looted and smuggled from Italy and Greece, and were repatriatedto their countries of origin. Today, hundreds of antiquities in Getty’s copy of the “Villa dei Papiri” (the Getty Villa) are lacking a clear, legal collecting history, and remain under close investigation by foreign governments.

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