Herculaneum-Ercolano: 'Villa of the Papyri" Tour Info.

Anyone visiting Herculaneum on a weekend *only* might be interested in
this special free off-site tour of the 'Villa of the Papyri'.
For info about the Villa and the papyrus scrolls do a google search on
"Villa of the Papyri" and 'Villa dei Papriri'.
It's on Saturday & Sundays hourly from 0900-1200, 4 tours with 25 people
and must be booked online or so it seems.
Go to
http://www.arethusa.net/w2d3/v3/view.../prenotazioni=
/contenuto.html?area=3Dercolano&struttura=3DVP
(in Italian) =A0=A0At the bottom of the page it will show a future date
which I believe shows that they are fully booked up until that date.
Ok now pick your Sat or Sun date after that date if possible. If you
get a pop-up (I'm not sure what they are actually called) in Italian
just click-on "OK" and continue. The next page will show the times and
how many openings there are for each tour.
Choose your time & # of persons (a limit of 3 possibly) and click-on
the "+" sign. =A0=A0
=A0=A0On the next page choose the number of tickets (only 1, 2 or 3 are
the available choices). Now on the right click-on "Clicca qui...".
Fill-in the info on the next page, in Italian but easy to follow
nome/name, via/address, CAP/zip-postal code, citta/city, provincia/state
or county, pull-down your country and then telephone, fax & *EMAIL*.
=A0=A0
=A0=A0Click-on the Conferma (Confirm) button and you should get an email
response within seconds with your confirmation.
I took this tour on Saturday March 13, '04.
Honestly it is a bit disappointing, as you see very little of the site
but you do get into the site.
So if you plan to be in Herculaneum on a weekend, book it.
It only takes a half-hour and it's entrance gate is only a stone's throw
from inside the Herculaneum site.
You basically walk down into a long deep pit and then up a ramp.
You see a single room on the Villa's 2nd floor and then up a ramp to
view some rooms on the 3rd floor. Nothing special, some partial walls
with floor mosaics although 1 is rather unique.
You then walk back to the bottom of the pit and over to a small intact
therme/bath. Which is nice because it actually has water in it , it's
ground water seeping in. The site has pumps and large hoses pumping out
the groundwater continuously.
Then you walk over to another small group of outdoor rooms (mosaic
floors) and a horse (skeleton) killed by the pyroclastic surge.
They want you there 20mins before the tour. So just enter Herculaneum
with everyone else thru the front entrance/ticket booth (of course you
must buy a ticket and walk down the long ramp. At the bottom is a
small but long bldg with a circular audioguide rental booth in front.
You meet at the left end of this bldg, in the middle of the bldg is a
bookstore and a snackbar at right end.
The Villa entrance is only ~50m from the meeting point.
The tour is in Italian only and it is nice that the Italian gov't allows
free access to this site. But what you see is very limited and all
outdoors. Regards, Walter



...And Paradise Was Lost...like teardrops in the rain...