Having reached his mid-seventies, Rome’s first emperor, Caesar Augustus, lived out his final days in a villa near the base of Mount Vesuvius. While traveling in the Bay of Naples, he fell ill and detoured to the ancestral home of his biological father’s family, the Octavii, near the city of Nola. In a.d. 14, at the age of 76, he breathed his last in the same room where his father had died, in the shadow of the great volcano.
The villa’s exact whereabouts were eventually lost. Given its reported proximity to Vesuvius, most archaeologists presumed that the a.d. 79 eruption that destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, along with countless rural villas, had also buried the estate in a deep blanket of volcanic debris. It seemed unlikely that it would ever be discovered. However, in 1929, the director of excavations in Pompeii, Matteo Della Corte, was tipped off by a friend about Roman ruins on the north slope of Vesuvius in the town of Somma Vesuviana, just a few miles from Nola. Although Della Corte’s excavations were brief, a narrow, 30-foot-deep trench revealed a building covered by volcanic ash. Leading volcanologists of the time determined that this destruction layer was a result of the a.d. 79 eruption. The scale of the building, ornate columns, and fragments of expensive marble left the archaeologists in awe. The owner of such an extravagant property must have been someone extraordinarily wealthy, an affuent merchant or perhaps a senator—or even an emperor. Della Corte concluded that, given its location and grandeur, the villa must be the property where the emperor had died, and he named it the Villa of Augustus.
Although this was a seemingly groundbreaking discovery, political turmoil in Italy and lack of funding kept archaeologists away from the site for the rest of the twentieth century. At long last, in 2002, a joint Italian-Japanese team returned to the villa. Not only did the new excavations confirm the existence
