Ancient Theater of Herculaneum

Severe from the eruption of 79 AD, it was the first monument to be discovered in the Vesuvian sites affected by the cataclysm. Since its discovery, it attracted great interest during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the cultured travelers who came to Naples from all parts of Europe and became a stop on the Grand Tour.

The monument is still accessible today via stairs built in the Bourbon era, descending more than 20 meters below the eruptive material.

The path is conceived as a real exploration in a unique and evocative place, in which there are, in addition to the remains of the ancient building, artifacts, graffiti left over the centuries by visitors, who by the light of torches passed through in the 18th and 19th centuries the tunnels and shafts created to penetrate into the bowels of ancient Herculaneum, where even small stalactites remain.

Of special interest:

the network of Bourbon wells that make the monument visitable in its essential parts (cavea, stairs for spectator access, orchestra, parodoi covered by the tribunal, stage front);

the grandiose gallery that allows visitors to visit the stage front about 6 meters high and 23 m long. On the two ends, at the tribunalia ? a kind of stage reserved for the highest-ranking magistrates- in an exceptional state of preservation are the two epigraphs dedicated to Marcus Nonius Balbus and Appius Claudius Pulcher, two important figures of the first century B.C. respectively the first tribune of the plebs in Rome (32 B.C.) and governor of Crete and Cyrene, the second consul of Rome in 38 B.C.;

the frescoes, which can be admired along the tunnels;

graffiti reminiscent of the Grand Tour with signatures tracing the modern history of the site;

the young stalactites formed by the percolating limestone waters of the aquifer over the 300 years since discovery;

finally, in one of the oldest tunnels, in the access trench to the first well made by farmer Ambrogio Nocerino, known as ? in 1710, the imprint of the head-portrait of the Roman proconsul Marcus Nonius Balbus, honored benefactor of the city of Herculaneum, which became detached from the rest of the torso by the violence of the eruption. The imprint remained imprinted in the layer of ash, lapilli and mud, which, as it solidified, produced a layer of volcanic tuff. The bust with the portrait head of M. Nonio Balbo is on display at the National Museum in Naples, as are most of the bronze and marble sculptures found during the Bourbon excavations.