Herculaneum
— where the wood should be ash, and isn't.
Not only on a wall.
“The seaside town that Vesuvius did not burn so much as bury. Pompeii fell under falling ash; Herculaneum went under a wall of hot mud that set to rock and sealed everything it touched. So the wood is still here, carbonised black but standing: balconies, doors, a child's bed, the beams that roofed the streets. Smaller than Pompeii, and richer, a resort for Romans who wanted the bay without the crowds. For two centuries everyone assumed the people had got away. Then they opened the boathouses down by the old shore.
Herculaneum, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Herculaneum sits on the Bay of Naples about eight kilometres southeast of the city, at the western foot of Mount Vesuvius, in the comune that now carries its name, Ercolano. The Romans called it Herculaneum, after Hercules, the hero its founding was credited to. It was a small, wealthy seaside town, perhaps four to five thousand people, when the eruption of AD 79 destroyed it along with Pompeii and Oplontis. The three sites, with Torre Annunziata, were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1997. Only part of the ancient town has been dug out; the rest lies under the modern streets of Ercolano, which is why the excavation reads as a deep open pit with the living town pressed against its rim.
What sets Herculaneum apart is how it was buried. Pompeii was smothered in falling ash and pumice; Herculaneum was overrun by pyroclastic surges, fast walls of gas and ash that left between roughly sixteen and twenty metres of material over the town, hardening into a tuff-like rock. The heat carbonised organic matter instead of burning it away, so wood survived: roof beams, doors, partition screens, a wooden bed, even loaves of bread and a boat. Upper storeys still stand, which almost never happens at a Roman site. In the Villa of the Papyri, a seaside house thought to have belonged to Julius Caesar's father-in-law, about 1,800 papyrus scrolls were found carbonised in 1752, the only library to come down intact from the ancient world.
The town was found by accident in 1709, when well-diggers struck the back wall of its theatre; systematic excavation began in 1738 under the Bourbon king Charles, a decade before digging started at Pompeii. For two centuries it was assumed the residents had fled to safety, until excavations of the old shoreline in the 1980s and 1990s uncovered more than three hundred skeletons crowded into the stone boathouses, killed by the heat of the first surge. The archaeological park is a short walk downhill from the Ercolano Scavi station on the Circumvesuviana line from Naples. It is far smaller than Pompeii and can be walked in a couple of hours; early in the day the deep streets hold shade and the crowds are thinnest.