The search for the lost library of Rome

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Sunday Times
Robert Harris

Even in our age of hyperbole, it would be hard to exaggerate the significance of what is at stake here: nothing less than the lost intellectual inheritance of western civilisation

Down a side street in the seedy Italian town of Ercolano, wafted by the scent of uncollected rubbish and the fumes of passing motor-scooters, lies a waterlogged hole. A track leads from it to a high fence and a locked gate. Dogs defecate in the undergrowth where addicts discard their needles.

Peering into the dark, stagnant water it is hard to imagine that this was once one of the greatest villas in the Roman world, the size of Blenheim Palace, extending for more than 250 yards along the Bay of Naples. (An impression of what it must have looked like is provided by the Getty Museum in California, which is an exact replica.) Its nemesis, Vesuvius, still looms over it less than four miles away. When the mountain erupted on August 24, AD79 it buried the villa under a mantle of volcanic rock 100ft thick, altering the coastline and pushing the sea back by hundreds of yards.

All knowledge of the great house was lost until 1738, when workmen sinking a well shaft encountered a mosaic floor. It was too deep to excavate; instead, over the next 20 years under the supervision of Karl Weber, a Swiss military engineer, a network of tunnels was hewn through the debris clogging the great peristyle, the atrium and the Olympic-sized swimming pool. Cartloads of treasures were brought to the surface, destined for the art collection of the King of Naples.

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