Tucked into a canyon where the Santa Monica Mountains meet the sea north of Los Angeles, the Getty Villa is one of the most unusual museums in the United States: a working recreation of an ancient Roman country house, built to display one of the world’s finest collections of Greek, Roman and Etruscan art. Bougainvillea spills over colonnades, fountains play in formal gardens, and inside, marble gods and bronze athletes stand as they might have two thousand years ago.
The museum is the older half of the J. Paul Getty Museum, whose second campus, the hilltop Getty Center, opened later in Brentwood. But the Villa is where the Getty story began—and where it returns, again and again, to antiquity.
