Tokyo Team Revives Hunt for Augustus Villa Near Vesuvius

A villa lost, then reburied

The dig's main aim was to find a villa owned by Augustus, who lived from 63 BCE to 14 CE and was Rome's first emperor. The area matches descriptions of where he died. In the 1920s a local farmer found a hard buried structure there, and archaeologists uncovered columns and sculpture.

In the 1930s Benito Mussolini ordered resources diverted to the excavation of Pompeii. The suspected "Villa Augustea" was reburied.

Some 70 years later, Aoyagi's team restarted the work. The buildings, murals and artifacts they found looked more typical of the second century, long after Augustus's death. The team concluded the villa was buried by a Vesuvius eruption in AD 472 and dropped the Augustus theory.

A second structure, one level deeper

In 2019, the team found a separate structure one level deeper. Researcher Iwaki said the group had moved on by then. "We had given up [on the Augustus connection] and were excavating with a different subject in mind," he recalled.

He was doubtful at first. "I was suspicious at first, but new ruins continued to emerge from the following year onward, expanding the scale of the site," Iwaki said. "The facts piled up gradually, and by around 2024 I was increasingly convinced."

One factor strengthened his confidence. Damage to the newly excavated structure was caused by pyroclastic flow from the 79 CE eruption, which points to a building older than the one the team first dated.

The team also found a system of multiple furnaces. Seven have been uncovered so far.

Aoyagi first went to Italy in 1969 as a graduate student and studied for three years at the University of Rome. He later got Italian government permission to dig at Pompeii, on a small project with barely enough funding to hire one photography assistant. He went on to dig in Sicily and Tarquinia, and the acclaim those digs earned opened the door to the Somma project.