The excavations of Herculaneum have given back the remains of the town buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, together with Pompeii, Stabiae and Oplontis. Here, though, it was not only ash and lapilli that fell: a blanket of mud and pyroclastic material came down, from ten to twenty-five metres thick, which hardened into pappamonte, a rock like tufa but softer. It was a tomb and a strongbox at once. Of the ancient town's twenty hectares, four have been brought to light.
What to see
The plan is the orthogonal Greek one: three decumani running parallel to the coast, two of them excavated, and five cardines, of which the third, fourth and fifth can be walked. The walls, which the historian Lucius Cornelius Sisenna dismissed as "small", were two or three metres thick, and after the Social War they lost any defensive purpose, so that houses simply swallowed them. The streets are paved with lava but bear no wheel ruts: the slope was too steep for carts to climb up from the harbour, and goods came on muleback.
Visiting
The part nobody forgets is down at the bottom, below the suburban baths. The digs begun in 1980 reached the ancient shoreline, and in the arched chambers facing the beach they found the hull of a boat and the bodies of about 300 people: they had taken shelter there waiting to escape by sea and were caught by the pyroclastic flows, still carrying the coins and jewels they had grabbed. The area later turned into a marsh, and was drained and reopened to the public in 2024. The rest is a domestic town, small in scale: the only sewer found runs under cardo III and collected the water of the forum, of the impluvia, of the latrines and of the kitchens along it.
Our editors' tip
Herculaneum was dug the wrong way round, through galleries, like a mine. In 1709 a peasant, Ambrogio Nocerino known as Enzechetta, widening a well for his vegetable plot struck fine marble: the well had pierced the stage of the theatre, long believed to be the temple of Hercules. From 1738 the Bourbons went back to cutting tunnels sometimes a metre wide, unlit, at risk of collapse and poisonous gas; out of one of them came the Villa of the Papyri, with over 1800 carbonised scrolls. Then Pompeii turned up, where you only had to shift the ash, and work here stopped. Open-air digging resumed only in 1927, with Amedeo Maiuri. The forum, the temples and the cemeteries are still down there.