Above the Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades, the Getty Villa offers a striking proposition: ancient Mediterranean art displayed inside a modern museum shaped like a Roman country house. The site is not an excavated Roman residence, nor a surviving villa transported from Italy. It is a twentieth-century interpretation whose architecture, gardens and collections invite visitors to think about how antiquities once occupied lived spaces.
The Getty says the building was modeled on the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Because much of that ancient villa remains underground, the Getty’s architects used the excavated plan and borrowed architectural details from other houses in Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae. The result is a deliberate modern reconstruction, not an exact replica of every room in a fully excavated ancient building.
