Can this ruin be saved? Let’s hope

An $18-million preservation project will be launched at Herculaneum, the city of ruins about 10 miles southeast of Naples, Italy.

That news, announced this month by British School at Rome, a century-old research and cultural institution, delighted me. I love the ancient places around the Bay of Naples, crammed between noisy, polluted, densely populated modern suburbs, with beautiful but vaguely malevolent Mt. Vesuvius on the horizon.

Travelers will find vast, extraordinarily well-preserved Pompeii; villas at Stabia and Oplontis; and, not least, Herculaneum, a seaside resort that catered to the rich and famous of Rome before Vesuvius blew up in AD 79.

I visited Pompeii and Herculaneum, UNESCO World Heritage sites, about five years ago, and I returned last month while I was on vacation with my family. While everyone else toured Pompeii, I went to Herculaneum, which is smaller and less frequently visited than Pompeii but spectacular in its own way.

Unlike Pompeii, which was covered by pumice and volcanic ash after Vesuvius exploded, Herculaneum succumbed to a surging river of mud that eventually hardened, leaving the town 60 feet underground and relocating the once-adjoining shoreline to the west. The mud preserved astonishing details: a wooden sofa and table, upper stories of buildings, exquisite wall paintings and mosaics, bronze and marble statuary (now in the National Archeological Museum of Naples) and a trove of ancient texts written on papyri that gave a suburban estate where it was found its name: the Villa of the Papyri.

On my recent visit to Herculaneum, I planned to tour the Villa of the Papyri, the model for the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, which was built above the Pacific Coast Highway in the late ‘60s and served as the J. Paul Getty Museum until the opening of the Getty Center in 1997.

I also wanted to take stock of the ruins. The last time I visited Herculaneum, it looked more like an inner-city quarry than one of the most exclusive summer resorts in the Roman world: Weeds grew out of mosaic floors, pigeons littered the site with their droppings and whole sections were closed because of flooding.

Unaware that a big conservation project was on the drawing board, I went hoping that, by some miracle, money and momentum had been found to save the ancient city. But nothing had changed, and limited tours of the compelling Villa of the Papyri were available only on weekends.

Instead of lingering in Herculaneum, I satisfied my hunger for ruins by visiting the Villa of Poppaea Sabina in nearby Torre Annunziata. It is mentioned in Robert Harris’ recent novel “Pompeii,” which I used as a guidebook.

Tourism and archeology are intimately connected, especially at Herculaneum, which was discovered and originally excavated in the early 18th century.

Attracting tourists has long been a prime motivation for archeological fieldwork, said Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, author of “Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum” and director of the British School at Rome, which will undertake the new conservation project at Herculaneum. “Excavation at Pompeii and Herculaneum brought the world to their doorsteps,” he told me in a telephone interview.

From 1828 on, tunneling at Herculaneum yielded to a more sweeping sort of excavation in which huge areas of the ruins were dug up and exposed to the light of day. In the early ‘90s, this sort of archeological work began at the Villa of the Papyri, igniting a controversy between scholars of ancient texts, who are convinced that more undiscovered scrolls will be found in the library ruins, and preservation-minded archeologists, who think conservation of what has already been unearthed is more crucial than more digging.

Even a casual visitor to Herculaneum can see degradations. Wallace-Hadrill calls it a “massive maintenance problem” that, has been addressed in stopgap fashion. Several days after then-first lady Hillary Clinton visited Herculaneum during the Group of Seven summit in Naples in 1994, the roof of one of the houses she toured collapsed. Wallace-Hadrill realized that the site was in crisis and needed preservation, not further excavation.

The recently announced Herculaneum conservation plan was made possible by the application of an Italian law that allows private organizations to work at sites controlled by the state and by a grant from Packard Humanities Institute, a Los Altos, Calif. group that has sponsored other archeological projects.

The project has been welcomed by Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, superintendent of Pompeii and Herculaneum. “With the new accord it will be possible to open workshops, begin restoration and offer visitors a fuller and more detailed view of the old city,” Guzzo said in an e-mail.

That’s heartening for those who look up, yearningly, at the Getty Villa while driving along Pacific Coast Highway. But it doesn’t solve the problem of further digging at the Villa of the Papyri, where scholars suspect more scrolls illuminating mysterious aspects of the ancient world could be found.

Private funding saved Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. The Roman-era Bay of Naples is farther from us in time and space but no less important. So I’m praying for another angel to give us the library of the Villa of the Papyri to enrich our knowledge of Herculaneum, without pigeon droppings.

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Besides Her World, Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at www.latimes.com/susan spano. You may e-mail her at postcards@latimes.com. She regrets she cannot respond individually.