Villa Ruggiero, at via Alessandro Rossi 42 in Ercolano, is one of the smallest villas of the Miglio d'Oro. It was built by Baron Enrico Petti in the second half of the eighteenth century; in 1863 it was bought by the Ruggiero family, who kept it until 1985, when it passed to the Ente per le Ville Vesuviane and was restored.
What to see
Not far from corso Resina, the villa rises on three levels around an elliptical courtyard closed towards the garden by a deep exedra. The façade is in Rococo taste, with a large portal of piperno and white marble. The rear façade, facing Vesuvius as in most villas of the Miglio d'Oro, is more elaborate: a wide serliana supports the main-floor terrace and creates a transverse gallery between the hexagonal vestibule and the courtyard. The bulging railings are interrupted by four rusticated pillars that bore as many terracotta busts, recently stolen; the three windows onto the terrace have stucco cartouches and scrolls, and the central, taller one is topped by a niche with a terracotta bust of Saint Januarius facing Vesuvius, following the tradition of the Vesuvian villas.
The rooms of the main floor revolve around the great ballroom, frescoed with floral and natural motifs and with Pompeian-style panels and ovals. The side stables face onto the courtyard, their piperno elements well preserved. Beyond the wrought-iron gate you climb to the garden, with a central avenue lined with benches ending in a niche on axis with the entrance portal, and to a citrus grove, typical of eighteenth-century Vesuvian parks. In the nineteenth century a third floor was added to the original two-level layout and the north wing was extended.
Visiting
The villa houses offices of the Comune of Ercolano, among them the «Giovanni Buonajuto» civic library. Access times for the library, courtyard and garden should be checked.
Our editors' tip
The four stolen busts represented the seasons of the year and of life, perhaps with the owners' faces in mythical guise; on the concave back of each, visible from the courtyard and the garden, were carved figures to ward off the evil eye from popular tradition, such as demons and bats. Around the terrace the sacred, with Saint Januarius protecting against eruptions, thus lived side by side with superstition.
