Suburban Baths, Herculaneum

The Suburban Baths of Herculaneum are one of the best-preserved Roman bath buildings anywhere. They stand just outside the town, on the ancient shoreline, partly built over disused defensive walls, and are thought to have been a gift to the town from its great patron Marcus Nonius Balbus in the early first century AD. When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, the building was buried under deep volcanic deposits that sealed it almost intact: vaults, windows, wall paintings and even woodwork survived.

Inside, the sequence of a Roman bath can be followed room by room. A small atrium lit from above has a basin where water spouted from the busts of herms, one showing Apollo. From here bathers moved to the cold room, then to the tepidarium with its marble benches, and to the caldarium, where a heated pool stood on raised floors over the hypocaust; a round laconicum, the Roman sweat room, is covered by a conical dome. Beyond is the furnace room with its bronze boiler. Unlike the Forum Baths in the town centre, there was only one set of rooms here, used by men and women at different times.

What makes the place memorable is its finish. The walls still carry coloured marble, including purple-veined pavonazzetto, frescoes in the late Fourth Style with painted architecture, stucco reliefs of nude warriors, and a mosaic of a wine bowl heaped with grapes. Light falls from skylights and windows much as it did two thousand years ago, and a wooden door on the stairs survived the eruption.

The baths were first probed by Bourbon tunnellers in the eighteenth century, but it was the open-air excavations led by Amedeo Maiuri in the twentieth century that exposed them. Standing at the bottom of the site, with the modern town piled high above, they show better than any other building how deeply Herculaneum was entombed.

Getting there

The baths are within the Herculaneum archaeological park in the centre of Ercolano, about 0.4 km from the town centre. Naples International Airport (NAP) is about 10 km away. The Ercolano Scavi station on the Circumvesuviana line from Naples is about ten minutes' walk downhill from the park entrance on Corso Resina.