Herculaneum: The Better-Preserved City Most Visitors Skip

Herculaneum is a fraction of Pompeii’s size and, object for object, considerably more astonishing. At Pompeii you look at the outlines of rooms. At Herculaneum you look at wooden doors, a bed frame, a folding screen with its hinges intact, and carbonised loaves still in the oven. The difference comes down to how each town died.

Why Herculaneum Survived Better

Pompeii, downwind, took hours of falling pumice that piled onto roofs until they collapsed. Herculaneum, on the other side of the mountain, got almost no pumice fall, and was then hit by pyroclastic surges: avalanches of superheated gas and ash moving at speed, with temperatures around 400°C or higher.

That sounds worse, and for the people it was. But for the buildings it was preservative:

• The surge filled rooms rather than crushing them, so upper floors and roofs stayed up.
• The heat carbonised organic material instead of burning it away, wood turned to black carbon but kept its shape, grain and joinery.
• The deposit set hard and deep, sealing everything from air and water for seventeen centuries.

The result: surviving wooden beams, doors, shelving, furniture and even food. The single most quoted example is a carbonised wooden partition screen, still standing between atrium and tablinum, with its folding mechanism visible.

The Boat Sheds

For most of the modern era it was believed the people of Herculaneum had escaped. Then, in the 1980s, excavation of the arched chambers along the ancient shoreline, the boat sheds, found over 300 skeletons crowded inside.

They had gathered at the waterfront waiting for rescue by sea, and the surge reached them there. The remains lie in the positions in which they died. It is the most sobering thing in the Bay of Naples, and one of the most scientifically valuable skeletal assemblages from the ancient world, a cross-section of an entire community caught in one moment.

The Villa of the Papyri and the Scrolls Being Read by AI

This is the strand that makes Herculaneum current.

Between 1752 and 1754, tunnellers working a luxury villa on the town’s edge recovered around 1,800 carbonised papyrus fragments, representing perhaps 800 original volumes. It is the only substantial library to survive from the ancient world, and the scrolls were burnt into fragile black cylinders that crumble if unrolled. Early attempts destroyed many outright.

Then the technology caught up. In 2015, X-ray phase-contrast tomography demonstrated that text could be recovered from a rolled scroll without opening it. The Vesuvius Challenge, an open machine-learning and computer-vision competition, built on this: in 2023 it recovered passages from a still-rolled scroll, and by 2025 an entire scroll had been read without ever being physically opened.

Most of the villa remains unexcavated. If the main library is still down there, we may be a decade away from recovering lost works of classical literature. That is not speculation about a lost civilisation. It is an active research programme with results already published.

Visiting: The Practical Comparison

• Ticket: about €16, considerably less than Pompeii, and combined tickets covering both sites exist.
• Hours: roughly 8:30am–7:30pm April to October, 8:30am–5pm November to March.
• Size: only a few hectares are excavated against Pompeii’s 66, because the modern town of Ercolano sits directly on top of the rest. Two to three hours is enough, versus a full day at Pompeii.
• Crowds are dramatically lighter. This is the practical argument: you can have rooms to yourself here in a way that is now impossible at Pompeii.
• Getting there: the Circumvesuviana train to Ercolano Scavi, then a downhill walk of about ten minutes.
• The approach is part of it. You enter along a walkway looking down into the excavated town, sunk below the modern streets, which makes the depth of the burial immediately legible.

So Which Should You Choose?

If you want the scale of a Roman city, streets, forum, amphitheatre, the sense of an entire urban organism, Pompeii. If you want detail and intimacy, upper floors, woodwork, and far fewer people, Herculaneum. Given two days, do both; they answer different questions. Given one, and if you have already seen a big classical site elsewhere, Herculaneum is the more surprising visit.

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How the Victims Died, and the Vitrified Brain

The boat-shed skeletons have made Herculaneum one of the most studied sites in bioarchaeology, and the science has been contentious.

The long-standing interpretation was that the pyroclastic surge killed instantly by extreme thermal shock. That temperatures were high enough to vaporise soft tissue in a fraction of a second, with skeletal indicators such as cracked and blackened bone and contracted limb postures cited as evidence. Later work has pushed back, arguing surge temperatures at the shoreline were lower than first claimed and that some observed effects are consistent with slower processes, including the classic “pugilistic posture” produced by heat-induced muscle contraction in many types of fire death.

The most remarkable single claim came from a study of a victim found face-down on a wooden bed in the College of the Augustales, in which researchers reported glassy black fragments inside the skull; interpreted as brain tissue that had been vitrified, flash-heated then cooled so rapidly it turned to glass. Later analyses proposed proteins preserved in that material. Both the vitrification interpretation and the temperatures it implies remain debated in the literature, which is a good example of how live this field still is.

What Survived Here That Exists Nowhere Else

• Wooden architecture in place. roof beams, door frames, shelving, a bed, and the celebrated folding partition screen with its hinges.
• The opus craticium house: a rare surviving example of cheap Roman timber-framed construction with rubble infill, a building type known mostly from Vitruvius’s disapproving description of it as a fire risk.
• Food — carbonised bread, figs, grain, and in the sewers beneath the town, an extraordinary volume of food waste that has told us more about the ordinary Roman diet than almost any other deposit.
• Upper floors and balconies, including one still projecting over the street, almost nothing comparable survives at Pompeii.
• Fabric, rope and netting, carbonised but legible.

The Town Under the Town

An important thing to understand about Herculaneum’s small size: it is not that little was built, it is that little can be dug. The modern town of Ercolano sits directly on top of the ancient one under 15–20 metres of hardened volcanic deposit. Excavation means either tunnelling or demolishing a living town, which is why the Villa of the Papyri remains largely unexcavated and why the theatre is still visited by underground tunnel rather than in daylight.

That deposit is also why the preservation is so total, and why what remains buried is likely in the same condition. If the main library of the Villa of the Papyri is still down there, it is probably still readable by the methods now being developed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Further Reading

• UNESCO; Pompeii, Herculaneum and Torre Annunziata
• The Vesuvius Challenge and The Herculaneum Society on the papyri