It is one of the few Neapolitan villas of the XVIII and XIX centuries in Ercolano not located on the Golden Mile, the road stretch of the old Strada delle Calabrie filled with these wonderful villas. Its Baroque style reveals its origin as dating from the XVIII century. Unfortunately, it has been then the seat of the Bourbon Town Hall and is currently a rent house, so that it is now in seriously bad conditions.

The Excavations of the ancient village of Ercolano make up one of the main archaeological areas of Italy. According to the myth, it was founded by Hercules in the XIII century b. C., and then romanized as the Roman took over the area of Campania. Ercolano was then destroyed by the eruption of the Vesuvius, in August of 79 a, C., as well as Pompeii, Oplonti, Stabiae and every village around the volcano. Differently from the other villages, Ercolano was not destroyed by the rain of ash and volcano stones, which in other places broke the roofs and most of the walls, but was “buried from below” by a mud flow that reached a height of 12 to 25 meters: most of the roofs and all the walls were preserved, only the loose things and the statues were dragged away. The mud flow grew hard and so wiped off every trace of the village, of which only a faint memory survived through the writings by Pliny, the admiral of the Roman fleet of Miseno: he sailed too near to the coast to watch the eruption and so was killed by the poison gas of the volcano. Only in 1709 and by accident was a wall from a theatre discovered, during the digging of a well for the prince d'Elboeuf. This episode was as lucky as unfortunate, because it did more damages than the Vesuvius did. Two statues (called Piccola and Grande Ercolanese) were taken to the Museum of Dresden where they were noticed by Winckelmann and by the future queen of Naples, Maria Amalia who, once in the Kingdom in 1738, had the excavations begun. [...] More