Naples and surroundings and next Events

VILLA OF THE PAPYRI

The most famous of the luxurious villas at Herculaneum is the "Villa of the Papyri" It stretches down towards the sea in four terraces. Piso, a literate man who patronized poets and philosophers, built there a fine library, the only one to survive intact from antiquity. Scrolls from the villa are stored at the National Library, Naples. The scrolls are badly carbonized, but a large number have been unrolled, with varying degrees of success. There is now a real prospect that it will be possible to read the unopened scrolls using X-rays. The same techniques could be applied to the scrolls waiting to be discovered in the as-yet unexcavated part of the villa, removing the need for potentially damaging the unrolled scrolls.