Pompeii pass - Oplontis and Villa Poppea - information

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Visitor and background information for Oplontis and Villa Poppea.

Opening hours:

Villa Poppea 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 Villa Poppea, and counts as a single entrance, just one of the 12 places covered by your pass.

Some history:

The site of Oplontis, between Pompeii and Herculaneum, is nowadays in the modern town of Torre Annunziata. Villa Poppea (Poppaea after the name of Emperor Nero's second wife), a UNESCO protected site, is a grand residence dating to the middle of the first century BC.

Villa Poppea was overwhelmed by the same pyroclastic surge that killed the residents of Herculaneum, but unlike there the Oplontis site did not contain any human remains - the residents are assumed to have fled, but it is also thought that the villa was not in use at the time of the eruption and was undergoing repairs from a previous earthquake. Many of the artefacts found when excavating the villa (roughly 60% is thought to be uncovered) are on show in the Naples Archaeological Museum.

Again, as with Herculaneum, the comparatively light ash fall means that many rooves did not collapse - this means that today Villa Poppea is home to some of the least damaged and most vibrant frescoes from Imperial Roman times. There is a peristyle garden surrounded by a colonnade and a large swimming pool - this was a grand villa, and sumptuous decoration abounds. Less abundant are likely to be the tourists and you may well find yourself in empty rooms admiring the richly coloured friezes.

Try this site for many, many photographs and inisghtful comment - a true labour of love for Oplontis, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae and the vast bulk of this fascinating tract of the Campanian coast.

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