Villa of the Mysteries
— the red the ash kept whole.
Not only on a wall.
“A villa on the northwestern edge of Pompeii, outside the old Herculaneum Gate. The Initiation Room is what people come for. Twenty-nine life-sized figures on a wall of dense, deep red, painted before the eruption that buried the city in AD 79. The rite they are caught in has never been fully read. The room kept its colour because the ash kept its air out. It is the longest walk in the park, and most groups turn back before they reach it.
Villa of the Mysteries, 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.
The Villa of the Mysteries sits on the northwestern edge of Pompeii, about four hundred metres outside the old Herculaneum Gate and the city walls. It was a large suburban country house, built in the early second century BC and altered repeatedly over the next two hundred years of Roman occupation. The villa was buried under several metres of volcanic pumice and ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, and rediscovered piece by piece beginning in 1909 under the Pompeii superintendency. The site today is part of the Parco Archeologico di Pompei, a UNESCO World Heritage property inscribed in 1997 that covers roughly 66 hectares of excavated ruins in the Campania region, about twenty-five kilometres southeast of Naples.
The room people walk so far for is painted a dense, near-saturated red, the tone that historians of Roman painting now call Pompeian red after the city. The colour comes from cinnabar, a mercury-sulphide pigment ground from ore mined in antiquity at Almadén in Spain and at Monte Amiata in Tuscany. Cinnabar was the most expensive red the Roman world had, reserved for the walls of the wealthy. The frescoes in the Initiation Room hold twenty-nine near-life-sized figures across three walls, depicting what is most often read as a Dionysian rite, and are dated to about 60 BC. They survived because the eruption sealed them under metres of ash for more than eighteen centuries.
The villa lies at the far western edge of the archaeological park, about a fifteen-minute walk from the Porta Marina entrance through the old city. The Parco Archeologico di Pompei is open daily from nine in the morning, closing at five from November through March and at seven from April through October. An adult ticket runs around twenty euros and includes the whole excavated city; a separate Villa dei Misteri ticket gives faster entry directly to this corner of the site through the western gate. The Pompeii Scavi station on the Circumvesuviana line from Naples leaves visitors at that western gate.