Naples National Archaeological Museum
— — the room where Pompeii kept its colour.
Not only on a wall.
“MANN holds what Vesuvius preserved. The Farnese marbles came down from Rome in the 18th century; the frescoes and mosaics came up from Pompeii and Herculaneum on carts. The Farnese Hercules stands four metres tall in a hall built for him. The Alexander mosaic, lifted from the House of the Faun, has its own room. The Gabinetto Segreto — locked for most of two centuries — keeps the erotic Pompeian objects that Bourbon catalogues could not list. The cases still smell faintly of varnish.
Naples National Archaeological Museum, 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.
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The place, in three passes.
The National Archaeological Museum of Naples — known by its Italian initials as MANN — occupies a late 16th-century palazzo on a low rise above the centro storico, near the Museo metro stop on Piazza Cavour. The building was begun in 1585 as a cavalry barracks, repurposed as the seat of the University of Naples in the 17th century, and converted to a museum under Charles of Bourbon in 1777 to hold the Farnese antiquities he had inherited from his mother. It is now regarded as one of the most important archaeological collections in the world, alongside the British Museum and the Louvre.
Two collections define the museum. The Farnese marbles came from Rome in stages from 1787 and include the Farnese Hercules — a Roman copy of a Lysippan original, about 3.17 metres tall — and the Farnese Bull, the largest surviving sculptural group from antiquity, carved from a single block. The Vesuvian collection holds the frescoes, mosaics, bronzes, silver, and household objects lifted from Pompeii and Herculaneum after 1748. The Alexander Mosaic, removed from the House of the Faun in Pompeii in 1843, fills its own room with roughly 1.5 million tesserae depicting the battle of Issus.
MANN is open Wednesday through Monday from roughly 9:00 to 19:30 and closed on Tuesdays. The standard adult ticket is around 22 euros; visitors under 18 enter free. The Museo metro stop on Line 1 sits at the corner of the building; Piazza Cavour on Line 2 is a two-minute walk. The Gabinetto Segreto, the room of erotic Pompeian objects sealed for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, is now open with the standard ticket. Allow three hours at minimum; the mosaics and the Farnese hall reward two visits more than one.