For centuries they have embellished the collections of museums in half Europe and across the Atlantic. Discoveries, revealed to the world, stripped of their most valuable content and then, almost always, returned to the earth and oblivion.
A strange fate, that of the villas found mostly in Boscoreale, but also in the neighboring territories of Boscotrecase and Terzigno, north of Pompeii, of which they constituted a suburban area. A vast agricultural area, particularly fertile for its geological events prior to the eruption of 79 AD, which also abruptly and violently changed the course of history there. Here are produced oils, wines and cereals and shepherding was widely practiced there. In that bucolic context, in the large lands, rustic villas arose accompanied by environments intended for agricultural work, but also equipped with all the comforts in use at that time and often finely embellished in the spaces of residential use.
The first to explore that site was the engineer Karl Jakob Weber, already engaged between Pompeii and Herculaneum. And throughout the second half of the 18th century, the excavations brought to light dozens of villas, systematically deprived of their findings and also of valuable wall paintings, mostly shipped abroad, apart from those fortunately entrusted to the new Archaeological Museum of Naples. Then, after a long abandonment, attention returned to Boscoreale a century later with the discovery of other villas with rich endowments, also shipped to foreign museums. Like the so-called "Boscoreale treasure", over one hundred precious pieces of refined goldsmith's art, especially silver, found in the Villa della Pisanella and transferred to the Louvre.
Other random findings occurred in the 1900s, but all the villas were buried again. And so it is no surprise that after so many excavations and explorations over the course of three centuries only one villa, completely restored, remains open to visitors in Boscoreale: Villa Regina.
Villa Regina
It was surrounded by vineyards, Villa Regina, as the casts of the roots of the vines tell to posterity. And that wine production was prevalent is evidenced by the rooms used for winemaking: the torcularium with the press, the tank for pressing the grapes, the container for the must and the wine cell with 18 dolia, or barrels. There was also a granary and a cistern. And a cart for moving the products was found. While in the residential part, the villa, built in the 1st century BC and enlarged in the Augustan and then Julio-Claudian age, has a frescoed triclinium according to the canons of the III and IV Pompeian style.
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