Seduced by local tales of wells containing ancient sculptures and other artworks, in 1709 the French aristocrat Emmanuel Maurice, Duke of Elbeuf, acquired the site of a recently dug well in the Bay of Naples. The plan was to tunnel out from its bottom in search of antiquities. In due course, marble statues were retrieved from the site, later identified as the theatre of Herculaneum. The duke’s finds furnished the Villa d’Elbeuf, the mansion he built himself near the small village of Resina. It soon became clear that the whole Roman town was buried beneath the densely inhabited settlements lining the coast.
In 1738, the Bourbon king of Naples, Charles VII, built a summer palace nearby at Portici. The official Bourbon excavations at Herculaneum began the same year, attracting the attention of travellers such as Horace Walpole who wrote in a 1740 letter, ‘This under-ground city is perhaps one of the noblest curiosities that ever has been discovered… They began digging, they found statues; they dug, further, they found more. Since that they have made a very considerable progress and find continually.’ At Portici, Charles assembled the artefacts that were being excavated not only at Herculaneum but also at Pompeii, Stabiae, and the rich countryside villas devastated by AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius. Before long, a Herculanense Museum was established in one of the wings of the palace for the king’s pleasure and that of his guests.
It became a major landmark for travellers on the Grand Tour in Italy. Famous writers described with awe the profusion and beauty of the objects. Goethe was among them in 1787, calling the Portici museum in his Italian Journey ‘the alpha and omega of all collections of antiquities’. Visitors would admire in the splendid rooms of the palace detached fragments of frescoes framed and hung like paintings, reassembled opus sectile marble floors, and alabaster jambs framing the doors of antechambers filled with marble busts and bronze statues. Most of the antiquities in the palace at Portici were moved in 1816 to the Museo Borbonico in Naples (today’s National Archaeological Museum of Naples), and the palace now hosts the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Naples Federico II, while the surrounding park can be visited as a botanical garden.
