The Villa of the Papyri is mostly still buried. It was a huge seaside villa at Herculaneum, on the slope below Vesuvius, and when the eruption of 79 AD sent a mud and ash flow down on the town, the villa was covered by twenty metres of hard volcanic rock. In the 1750s, the Bourbon engineers who were digging in the area tunnelled down and found marble statues, bronzes of rare quality and a library of around 1,800 papyrus scrolls, charred into black lumps by the heat. The scrolls, many of them works by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, have been read in recent years using X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence. The villa may have belonged to Julius Caesar's father-in-law, Piso, though this is a guess. The villa in Malibu that houses the Getty Museum is a copy of it.
Today Herculaneum, now called Ercolano, is a crowded Neapolitan suburb of fifty thousand, and the excavated Roman town lies in a pit at the bottom of its streets. It is smaller than Pompeii but better preserved, with wooden beams, carbonised furniture and painted walls still in place, because the mud sealed everything. The villa is not generally open to visitors, and the site is mostly a place to think about what lies under your wheels.
The ride is a lesson in Neapolitan traffic. The roads are fast, noisy and chaotic, with scooters weaving, lights ignored and the surface patched and cracked. Ride defensively, and park the bike in a secure garage, since theft is a real concern in this area. The best riding is up the volcano. The road through Ercolano climbs by hairpins through pines and lava fields to a car park at about a thousand metres on Vesuvius, and the final stretch is a path to the crater. Weather and closures vary, so check before you go.
Fuel is plentiful around Ercolano, Portici and San Giorgio a Cremano, and Naples is a short ride along the coast. Take a coffee at a bar on the corner and have a sfogliatella, the crisp shell pastry, for breakfast. If you have time, go in spring or autumn, when the air is clear and the view of the bay and Capri is sharp.