Boscoreale

Vineyards on the slopes of the volcano greet whoever climbs to Boscoreale, the chosen ground of the Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio; the name recalls an old royal wood, the town lies inside the Vesuvius National Park, and from here the via Matrone leads up towards the crater. Beneath those rows, though, there is a buried town: in the age of Augustus this countryside, thick with farm villas that had turned over time into luxury residences, was a suburb of Pompeii, and the eruption buried it along with her.

The villas came back to light in the nineteenth century, and here begins the bitter part. They were dug by the owners of the land, on their own account: silverware, frescoes, bronzes and mosaic floors were detached and sold to the highest bidder, because the laws of the time allowed it. So today the things of Boscoreale are not in Boscoreale: they are in the Louvre, in the Metropolitan in New York, in the British Museum, in the Getty, in the Field Museum in Chicago, in Berlin, in Baltimore, in Belgium. What has stayed in the town is Villa Regina, a wine farm brought back to light by excavation. That life resumed here afterwards is told by certain lamps with Christian symbols from the fourth century; and to this day, besides fruit and wine, people work the lava stone by hand, which is to say the volcano itself.