villa

Freshly revealed “virgin surfaces” of Roman wall painting - pigments still largely untouched since antiquity - are emerging again at Villa Poppaea, part of the Oplontis complex in the modern town of Torre Annunziata near Pompeii. The find is not just about beautiful color; it offers rare, unaltered evidence of how elite Roman interiors once looked before centuries of cleaning, conservation, and fading changed them. On a wet February morning, conservationists at the site carefully scraped away compacted volcanic deposits to expose panels of vivid red and other motifs - birds, fish, fruit, and a peacock linked with the goddess Juno - inside the villa’s oldest section, dated to the mid–first century BC. Site director Arianna Spinosa described the results