Pompeii pass - Boscoreale & Antiquarium information

Book 3 day Pompeii Pass

Visitor and background information for Boscoreale.

Opening hours:

Boscoreale is open seven days a week from 08.30 in the morning; from April until October, closing time is 19.30 - for the rest of the year closing time is 17.00.

Your Pompeii pass allows full entrance to Boscoreale and the Antiquarium, and counts as a single entrance, just one of the 12 places covered by your pass.

Some history:

The site of Boscoreale lies under the slopes of Vesuvius, barely a kilometre north of Pompeii, and was effectively an outlying rural suburb of Pompeii. Engulfed by the same eruption that covered neighbours Pompeii and Herculaneum, the important villa here is the villa of Publius Fannius Synistor, a.k.a Villa Boscoreale.

Villa Boscoreale is home to some extremely high quality frescoes, thought to date from around the middle of the first century BC. Their execution is of such a high standard that they are assumed to have been left untouched by the vagaries of fashion and decorative makeovers that saw neighbouring villas being regularly redecorated. Vesuvius's eruption then froze them in time, entombing them.

However, the villa was not to keep many of its fine frescoes, detached and sold off to the world's museums as many of them were (see the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art for example).

The area was, and indeed still is, an important one for agriculture and wine-making, and the slopes were home to many small estates and their smaller, less grand villas, family run affairs with perhaps a handful of slaves. One of these villas - Villa Regina, a wine producing villa - may be visited as the conclusion of a visit to the Boscoreale Antiquarium.

The Antiquarium was founded in 1991 and, through exhibitions and collections of objects from various sites around Pompeii, aims to give an insight into the conditions, environment and day to day life of those who lived and worked under the shadow of Vesuvius.

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