Conservation work on a luxurious royal villa near Pompeii has revealed sumptuous frescoes, including one depicting a famous fictional theater character, and another of a peacock.
Additional recent work using cast molds has identified the position of a colonnade of trees in the villa’s garden, showing that they were planted in precise ornamental positions.
Called the Villa di Poppea, it is believed to have belonged to Poppaea Sabina, the second wife of the mad Emperor Nero. Located in a town called Oplontis, south of Naples in the heart of Greater Pompei, as the archaeologists called it, it was buried along with the town under the ash of the mighty Vesuvius.
Ongoing excavations and conservation on the Villa di Poppea are focused on the western wing, where the frescoes were found in one of the most elegant of the staggering 103 rooms so far documented on the property.
It’s being called the Hall of the Peacock due to a pair of male birds depicted in vivid pigments on the south wall. Another depicts the character Pappus, a common figure in a kind of Roman theater called Antellan Farce. Pappus is an old fool, easily tricked by women, who in his attempts to appear young becomes more and more absurd looking.
Other rooms were found during the recent round of conservation work, including several small studies or bedrooms called cubicula, from which we draw our hated office haunts called cubicles.
These were found to be decorated with stucco artwork, frescoed walls, painted vaults, and floor mosaic. In the villa’s garden, casts made out of cavities in the volcanic ash that cover the area revealed the presence of tree roots. They were laid out in exactly the same pattern as twin rows of columns in the villa’s southern portico.
“These first results offer new and promising research perspectives for our understanding of the plan of the villa and for the study of the interactions between human settlement and the natural environment in the long term,” said Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.
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The delicate pigments—including Egyptian blue—are being conserved by the workers to ensure they remain in their original glory for years to come.
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