American, British and Italian archaeologists have made a major new find at the ancient Roman site of Stabiae, one of the hottest and most happening resorts in ancient times.
Stabiae has been neglected over the years because of its more famous neighbour Pompeii and because, frankly, there wasn't much to see there. But now a key new partnership has been set up to dig the whole area of the ancient 'Gomorrah-on-the-Gulf'.
Stabiae was in fact much naughtier than supposedly raunchy Pompeii and things went on there that have would have made a Roman patron - never mind matron - blush. According to Pliny the Elder, who died when Vesuvius belched down its wrath on the Neapolitan resort towns, Pompeii was a place you could safely take your daughters, while Stabiae was strictly for the wild oats sowing set - or wilder stuff yet.
Thanks to a ground-breaking Italian law, local archaeological authorities have forged a partnership with the US-based Restoring Ancient Stabiae (RAS) foundation. The latest product is the peristyle (surrounding colonnade) of the so-called 'Villa San Marco', a large Roman villa which was mostly excavated several years ago - only the second on the site.
"It's quite obviously the peristyle. One can tell from the spiral-shaped decorations," said Marian Zappei, an archaeologist from Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei (SAP). "This is a very exciting find," she said. "This discovery was made possible by the unstinting and unclouded sponsorship between SAP and Restoring Ancient Stabiae, a relationship cited by the State Department as the best example of cultural heritage collaboration between Italy and the United States," said RAS Vice President Andrew Bell of the University of Maryland.
Villa San Marco, which extends for about one square hectare, is a luxurious Roman villa with baths, a large porticoed garden with a pond, and a lovely view over the Bay of Naples.
About 0.3 hectares of the lovely building - getaway heaven for a Roman patrician - still have to be unearthed.
The first Roman villa to be found at the site, Villa Arianna, is about three times Villa San Marco's size but most of it (2.3 hectares) is still underground. This was excavated by Swiss archaeologist Karl Weber between 1757 and 1762.
RAS and SAP - which has built on a pathfinding agreement with the Packhard Humanities Institute for the preservation
of the other ancient Roman city in the area, Herculaneum - now intend to probe a third spot where a large building,
baths and fishpond are believed to be buried.
But RAS - which groups several American universities, the University of Birmingham in the UK and Naples' Federico II University - eventually plan to turf up the whole 40-hectare site of the ancient sin city. The peristyle - under which was found Stabiae's first skeleton, apparently crushed by falling masonry - has merely whet RAS's appetite.
"We want something much livielier than that," Webb said.
"We're very eager to get down there. Who knows what saucy secrets we'll find?"
