Villa dei Papiri and Costiera Amalfitana

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Villa dei Papiri

   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.

   Read the complete Villa dei Papiri write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Villa dei Papiri is where the day begins. Next is Villa dei Misteri.

2. 2. Villa dei Misteri

   Outside the walls of Pompeii, a few hundred metres from the Herculaneum Gate, stands a villa that holds one of the strangest paintings in the Roman world. The Villa of the Mysteries was a large country house and wine estate, and in one of its rooms a continuous frieze, nearly life-sized, runs around all four walls against a vivid red background, the famous Pompeian red. The figures include women, a young initiate, a satyr, a winged figure with a whip and the god Dionysus himself, and they seem to show a ritual of initiation into his cult, though nobody has ever been sure of the exact meaning. The paintings date from about the middle of the first century BC, some decades before the eruption.

   Read the complete Villa dei Misteri write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Villa dei Misteri comes up about 17 km into the recorded legs. Next is Costiera Amalfitana.

3. 3. Costiera Amalfitana

   The Amalfi coast road is the reason many riders first dreamed of Italy, and it lives up to the legend and then some, with a few catches. The SS163 Amalfitana, carved into the cliffs above the sea in the nineteenth century, winds along the southern side of the Sorrento peninsula from Positano to Vietri sul Mare, with hundreds of bends, sheer drops, tunnels, bridges and villages clinging to the rocks. Amalfi itself, a small town of about five thousand people at the mouth of a ravine, was once a powerful maritime republic that rivalled Venice and Genoa in the Middle Ages, and its cathedral, with its striped facade and Arab-Norman cloister, is a reminder of that glory.

   Read the complete Costiera Amalfitana write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 56 km into the recorded legs you reach Costiera Amalfitana. Next is back through Villa dei Misteri.

4. 4. back through Villa dei Misteri

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Villa dei Misteri write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   back through Villa dei Misteri, late in the day. Next is Villa dei Papiri.

5. 5. Villa dei Papiri

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Villa dei Papiri write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Back at Villa dei Papiri. That is the ride.