It is the only library of antiquity to have come down to us whole, and it came down carbonised. In the year 79 the most luxurious villa in Herculaneum, almost certainly belonging to Lucius Calpurnius Piso, Caesar's father-in-law, was still packing its scrolls to move them to safety when the pyroclastic flow sealed it under twenty-five metres of mud. In 1750 farmers digging a well found it again, and the Bourbon engineers explored it through tunnels like a mine: Karl Weber drew its plan, and on 19 October 1752 the first papyri came out, at first mistaken for lumps of charcoal and thrown away.
What to see
The villa stretched for 250 metres along the ancient shore, sheer above the sea, on several terraced levels: an atrium with eleven fountain statuettes around the impluvium, a peristyle a hundred metres long with sixty-four columns and a pool in the middle, the library, a belvedere at the end of a long walk. Through the tunnels the Bourbons pulled out eighty-seven statues, fifty-eight of them bronze, the largest collection of Greek and Roman sculpture ever found in a single place: the Sleeping Satyr, the Resting Hermes, the Dancers with inlaid eyes, the busts of philosophers, today all in the Archaeological Museum of Naples. Then, in 1765, gas fumes forced the shafts to be closed and the villa was lost for two centuries.
The scrolls numbered more than eighteen hundred, almost all in Greek and almost all Epicurean philosophy, largely by Philodemus of Gadara, the house philosopher; a few in Latin, among them a poem on the war of Actium. To unroll them the abbot Piaggio invented a loom-like machine, and many crumbled; today they are read without opening them, with tomography and artificial intelligence, and new lines emerge every year. Paul Getty had a full-size copy of the villa built in Malibu on Weber's plan: it is the Getty Villa Museum.
Visiting
The villa is still largely underground, beneath the houses of modern Ercolano. The open-air excavations of the eighties and nineties freed the atrium, the white basis villae with its large windows and some rooms of the lower floors, kept dry by pumps; it can be visited only on certain days, accompanied and by reservation, through the Archaeological Park of Herculaneum. What was taken away can be seen at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples and at the Officina dei Papiri in the National Library.
Our editors' tip
Do the full circuit: the villa at Herculaneum for the place, the bronze hall at the Naples museum for the statues, and the Officina dei Papiri in the Royal Palace to see the black scrolls and Piaggio's machine. Only by putting the three pieces together do you understand what this house was: the villa of the philosophers that the volcano preserved by burning it.