Ercolano

Ercolano is the modern town built directly on top of ancient Herculaneum — the Roman seaside resort buried in the same AD 79 Vesuvius eruption that destroyed Pompeii, but preserved very differently. While Pompeii was buried under 3-4m of ash (which scorched but didn't soak the organic material), Herculaneum was hit by repeated pyroclastic surges and ultimately buried under 25 meters of fine pyroclastic mud that cooled hard and sealed every wooden roof, every papyrus scroll, every second-storey balcony, and every textile in place. The result, excavated since 1738 by Charles of Bourbon and progressively since, is the only place where you can see Roman daily life with the wood still there — the carbonised wooden screen of the House of the Wooden Partition, the wooden bed in the House of the Carbonised Furniture, the second-storey overhangs that don't survive at Pompeii.

The Villa dei Papiri (the 100m-long suburban villa attributed to Julius Caesar's father-in-law Lucius Calpurnius Piso, where ~1,800 carbonised papyrus scrolls were recovered including the entire Epicurean philosophical library of Philodemus of Gadara, the largest single ancient library ever recovered — still being unrolled with multispectral imaging at the Officina dei Papiri Ercolanesi in Naples) is the site that the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu literally replicated 1:1 as its main building. The skeletons in the boathouse arches (300 fugitives who fled to the seafront and were killed by the 500°C pyroclastic surge while waiting for evacuation, discovered in the 1980s and 1990s) are the most-photographed image of the catastrophic moment.

The site is UNESCO World Heritage (1997, jointly with Pompeii and Torre Annunziata). Above the ruins, the modern Ercolano (50,000 residents on the lower slopes of Vesuvius) is the eastern gateway to the Parco Nazionale del Vesuvio — the Gran Cono crater hike (1,281m, 30 minutes from the upper car park, reservation required) is the standard half-day. Along the SS18 (the Miglio d'Oro, the Golden Mile), 122 Bourbon-era villas built 1730s-1820s by the Naples aristocracy line the road from Ercolano to Torre del Greco — Villa Campolieto (Vanvitelli, 1763, now restored as a cultural centre) and Villa Favorita (royal residence) are open. The food is Vesuvian: spaghetti alle vongole, mozzarella di bufala, pomodorino del piennolo del Vesuvio DOP (the cherry tomatoes from the volcanic slopes), and the Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio DOC red and white from vineyards on the volcanic soil.