This story originally appeared in Maryland Today.
Perched above the glittering Bay of Naples, Stabiae was the vacation destination of choice for the who’s who of ancient Roman society. They’d flock to fabulous villas to host intellectual discussions, swim in the sea below and partake plentifully of the local wine, all while enjoying an unimpeded view of Mt. Vesuvius.
The partying came to a sudden end in the year 79, when the volcano erupted, releasing toxic gases and boiling-hot ash that buried the resort area, its neighboring towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and thousands of their inhabitants.
Yet the details on how the Roman elite lived, entertained and decorated their lavish homes have come to light two millennia later through excavations and analysis of the site led by University of Maryland faculty and students. This summer marked the 20th anniversary of their work in Italy, and a new book coming out next year will showcase their progress.
The unlikely project began with Leonardo Varone M.Arch. ’00, a native of the modern Italian city of Castellammare di Stabia. As a young boy, he had joined his father, who was a judge in Pompeii, along with a television crew and a nationally known reporter to see the ruins of the famous Villa of the Papyri in nearby Herculaneum. The vibrantly colored mosaics led to a love of Roman history.
But the villas of ancient Stabiae were, Varone says, “a second player” compared to those at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Visitors could wander up the cliff and ask a guard to show them around, but the site lacked any formal infrastructure. At UMD’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, his master’s thesis proposed turning the villas into an archaeological park, complete with a ticketing process, visitor’s center and transportation between the site and the modern city of 65,000 below.
Faculty members encouraged Varone to share his thesis with local government officials in C. di Stabia, who were excited about the prospect of increasing tourism to their town.
The roughly 72,000-square-foot site, with its dozen or so villas, had undergone prior excavations: In the 1700s, Swiss architect and engineer Karl Weber and Spanish military engineer Roque Joauín de Alcubierre, who was working for the Spanish king, dug up some of the site and made drawings of it, but the ruins were once again largely forgotten. In the 1950s, local scholar Liberio D’Orsi excavated rooms from the Villa San Marco and Villa Arianna.
In 2004, after several years of talks with Varone and the local government, UMD partnered with the Superintendency of Archaeology of Pompeii and the region of Campania to form the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation (RAS). Through RAS, led on UMD’s end by Professor Emeritus Robert Lindley Vann, students and faculty began traveling to Italy each summer, excavating Villa Arianna and its gardens.
“The Italians were saying, ‘Jeez, if the Americans are interested, maybe we should devote some more resources to this,’” says Matthew Bell, a UMD professor of architecture who serves as vice president of RAS and was Varone’s thesis adviser. “We succeeded in getting attention for tourism resources and a research focus to the site that might not have arrived otherwise.”
Over time, the Terps—and groups from Yale, Columbia, Emory and nearly 80 other universities—revealed more than 100 walls covered in richly colored frescoes of Roman gods, people, geometric designs and gardens, and a more extensive section of the gardens themselves.
“It’s stunning,” says art history major Stephanie Korth ’25, who traveled to the site this summer. “Almost all the walls are preserved. We have remnants of stairs leading up to a second story. You can still see the figures and all the little decorations.”
The team has also found that villas’ owners had set up their homes for rites related to the secret societies they belonged to, including the famous initiation known as the Eleusinian Mysteries.
“There are discs that hang from the ceiling or between columns, and wreaths and animal skins,” says Joseph C. Williams, assistant professor of architectural history and current supervisor of the project. “In some cases, these artifacts have been preserved, and in others, they’re represented in the frescoes.”
Now the UMD team is focused on documenting the paintings, plantings and general architecture of the houses. That process includes making line drawings—illustrations of the walls that feature digital measurements made by scanners and lasers. These illustrations are more nuanced and precise than photographs, says Williams.
For Varone, now an architect in Washington, D.C., the growth of Stabiae is a victory. He has volunteered his time to the project, personally accompanied Stabiae’s most famous fresco, “Flora di Stabiae,” from Baltimore’s airport to the National Museum of Natural History for an exhibit in the mid-2000s, and has seen the number of visitors to the site rise from just a couple thousand each year to some 100,000.
“I did something well beyond my wildest imagination,” he says.
Applications for the 2025 Maryland-led summer program open November 1, 2024. Learn more about UMD-Summer: Italy: In the Shadow of Vesuvius: Architectural Recording for Archaeology (ARCH).