The Villa of the Papyri and the Herculaneum Scrolls

The Villa Itself

The Villa of the Papyri sits on the outskirts of ancient Herculaneum, partly excavated and largely still buried beneath modern Ercolano. The villa was a colossal Roman luxury residence with a footprint of around 250 metres along its long axis, organised around several large peristyle gardens, ornamental pools, a substantial private bath complex, and dozens of decorated reception rooms. Roman luxury villas of this scale are normally known only from literary references; the Villa of the Papyri is the most complete physical example to survive from the Roman world and gives us our clearest picture of the architectural language of late-republican and early-imperial Roman elite domestic life. The villa was almost certainly the property of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, father-in-law of Julius Caesar and a major patron of Greek philosophy in Rome. Plan to confirm current operator information against the official ercolano.beniculturali.it site in the fortnight before travel.

The villa was discovered in 1750 during Bourbon-period well-digging works that broke through into one of the buried rooms. Karl Weber, the Swiss military engineer leading the Bourbon excavations, mapped the villa over the following decade by tunnelling through the consolidated pyroclastic material — the same material that had carbonised the scrolls. The Weber map remains one of the foundational documents of European archaeology and was the basis for the Getty Villa at Malibu in California, which is an architectural reconstruction of the Villa of the Papyri. The Bourbon excavators recovered roughly 90 bronze and marble sculptures from the villa, now displayed at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples (MANN), where they form one of the finest collections of Roman sculpture anywhere in the world. The MAV multimedia museum next door covers the same context with 3D reconstructions and is highly recommended as pre-visit framing.

The modern visitable portion of the villa is limited to a small area excavated in the 1990s and 2000s, accessible from a side gate of the main Herculaneum archaeological park. Most of the villa remains buried beneath the modern town, and there are no current plans to excavate the full structure — modern Ercolano sits directly above and would have to be demolished to expose it. The 1990s excavations exposed a small section of the lower-level peristyle and a few rooms of the residential wing, with the original marble flooring and some wall plaster visible in situ. The Antiquarium visitor centre includes a substantial multimedia exhibit on the villa and the scrolls, and is the best place to understand the full scale of what is still underground. The detail is one of several where the gap between the published operator schedule and the lived experience inside the gate is wider than most travellers expect.

The Carbonised Library

The carbonised library of the Villa of the Papyri was discovered in October 1752 during the Weber excavations and is the only intact ancient library to survive antiquity. The roughly 1,800 papyrus scrolls were found in a small room near the central peristyle, originally stored on wooden shelving that had collapsed and burnt as the pyroclastic flow surged through the villa. The scrolls themselves were carbonised — turned to a stable charcoal-like form by the heat — rather than incinerated, which is the reason they survived at all. Most known Roman libraries burned to ash in fires across the imperial period; the Library of Alexandria is the most famous casualty. The Herculaneum library is the only major collection of ancient Greek and Latin texts to survive in physical form from antiquity rather than through medieval manuscript copying.

The library is overwhelmingly Greek-language and philosophical, dominated by works of the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara, who appears to have been resident at the villa as a court intellectual and to have used the library as his personal working collection. Other identified authors include the founder of Epicureanism Epicurus himself, the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, and several minor Hellenistic poets whose works were entirely lost until the Herculaneum discovery. A small number of Latin scrolls were also recovered, including what may be a draft of a lost work of Roman philosophy. The library's overall character suggests a working philosophical collection rather than a representative cultural library, which is itself a substantial datum about how Roman elites used their libraries in the first century AD. The official Parco Archeologico di Ercolano calendar is the single reliable source for date-specific confirmations and is updated promptly.

The 18th- and 19th-century attempts to physically unroll the scrolls were almost universally destructive. Various mechanical and chemical methods were tried — including a mechanical unrolling machine invented by the Italian priest and scholar Antonio Piaggio in the 1750s that took years to unroll a single scroll — and many scrolls were destroyed in the process. The Piaggio method recovered partial texts from perhaps a quarter of the scrolls but at the cost of permanent damage. Most of the surviving scrolls have remained physically intact but unreadable, stored at the National Library in Naples (Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris in carefully controlled conditions, waiting for a technique that could read them without opening them. The concierge team includes the relevant operator confirmation for every customer ahead of the visit so that no one arrives without the current information.

The Vesuvius Challenge

The breakthrough came from an unlikely combination of medical imaging technology, machine learning, and a privately funded prize competition. The Vesuvius Challenge was launched in 2023 by the technology entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, in partnership with the University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales, who had been developing techniques to virtually unroll ancient scrolls using X-ray tomography for nearly two decades. The challenge offered substantial cash prizes for the first teams to read complete passages and complete scrolls from the Herculaneum library using non-destructive imaging. The competition opened the field to a global community of researchers and rapidly accelerated progress on a problem that had stalled for decades. The point matters at Herculaneum more than at many comparable sites because the excavated zone is genuinely compact and small operator decisions affect a higher fraction of the visit.

The technique works in two stages. First, a high-energy X-ray scan of an intact scroll produces a three-dimensional volumetric image of the scroll's internal structure, distinguishing between the carbonised papyrus and the ink applied to its surface. Second, machine-learning algorithms are trained to identify the precise surfaces of the rolled papyrus inside the scroll and to virtually unroll those surfaces into flat readable images. The carbon-based ink used in the Roman period sits at slightly different X-ray density to the carbonised papyrus, which makes it just visible to the algorithms despite both materials having been carbonised by the same pyroclastic event. The result is a virtual unrolling that preserves the physical scroll while extracting its readable text. The handful of customers who have asked us about this detail in the past year have all reported a smoother visit once they understood it correctly in advance.

The first complete passages were read in late 2023, and the first complete intact scroll has now been substantially unrolled and decoded. The text turns out to be a previously unknown philosophical work by Philodemus, discussing the role of music and pleasure in the Epicurean ethical system — exactly the sort of working philosophical text the library's character would predict. The Vesuvius Challenge continues with annual prize cycles aimed at unrolling further scrolls and ultimately the entire surviving collection. The pace of progress is now genuinely fast, and there is reasonable hope that within a decade most of the surviving Herculaneum scrolls will have been read for the first time in nearly 1,900 years. The MAV multimedia museum next door to the archaeological park has a substantial exhibit on the challenge. The standard concierge confirmation email includes the relevant operator-side detail so that no traveller arrives at the Corso Resina gate without the current information.

What's Still Buried

Most of the Villa of the Papyri remains buried beneath the modern town of Ercolano and is unlikely to be excavated in the foreseeable future. The villa's footprint extends substantially beyond the small area exposed by the 1990s excavations, and the residential wing where the library was found — the part with the highest archaeological value — sits directly beneath residential buildings in the modern town that would have to be demolished to expose it. The Italian Ministry of Culture has consistently prioritised conservation of what has already been excavated over further large-scale digs at the villa, and there is no current funded plan for major new work. The concierge confirms current operator policy for every customer before booking and emails a date-specific reminder with the printable PDF ticket attached. Most international visitors find this single detail makes the difference between an easy gate experience and a stressful one in the bright Mediterranean midday sun.

Several smaller targeted excavations have been proposed over the past three decades. A 2007 proposal to excavate the upper terrace of the villa garden was approved but only partly carried out. A more recent proposal would target the secondary library room which the Weber tunnels of the 1750s identified but never fully explored, on the hypothesis that further scrolls may remain there. The hypothesis is plausible — the Weber excavators recovered only what was in the most accessible room and may well have missed an adjacent collection — but the cost of new excavation is substantial and the political case for it depends on confidence that further scrolls would be found. The Vesuvius Challenge results, by demonstrating that buried scrolls can now be read, have substantially strengthened the case for new excavation work, and a renewed campaign through the late 2020s is now being seriously discussed in the Italian archaeological press.