Getty Villa

Listen first. Somewhere close by, water is running into a long, narrow pool. Under your feet the paving is warm and pale. The air smells of salt from the Pacific, mixed with rosemary and bay leaves from the garden beds. Columns throw stripes of shadow across painted walls in deep red, ochre and black. For a moment it is easy to forget that a busy coastal highway runs just below this hillside. This is the Getty Villa, and almost everything you see here was designed to recreate one specific house from the ancient world.

That house stood on the Bay of Naples, in the Roman town of Herculaneum. In 79 CE, Mount Vesuvius erupted. It buried the town under deep layers of volcanic material, and the house disappeared for centuries. In the eighteenth century, excavators dug tunnels into the hardened rock and found it again. They pulled out bronze and marble statues. They also found hundreds of carbonised scrolls of papyrus, the paper of the ancient world. Because of those scrolls, the house is now called the Villa of the Papyri.

Who owned that original villa? Nobody knows for certain. Many scholars think it may have belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. That idea is popular, but it remains a theory, not a proven fact. Most of the ancient house is still under the rock, and only part of it has ever been excavated. So the building around you is an informed reconstruction. Its designers combined the excavation plans with details borrowed from other Roman houses in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The man behind this project was J. Paul Getty, the oil businessman who was, for a time, one of the richest people in the world. He loved classical antiquity and collected Greek and Roman sculpture for decades. He already had a museum in his ranch house on this property. When the collection outgrew it, he chose to build a Roman villa rather than a modern gallery. The new museum opened to the public in 1974.

Here is a detail most visitors miss. Getty never saw it. By then he lived in England, and he did not travel back to California. He followed the construction through plans, photographs and reports. He died in 1976 and never walked through these gardens. When the museum first opened, many critics were unkind. Some called it a fake, a piece of Hollywood stage scenery. Today many people see it differently, as a serious attempt to show how a wealthy Roman home might really have felt.

Later, the Getty organisation built a much larger centre on a hilltop in Brentwood, across the Santa Monica Mountains. The paintings and other later art moved there. The Villa closed for a long renovation and reopened in 2006. Since then it has focused on the ancient Mediterranean world: Greece, Rome, and Etruria, the region of central Italy where the Etruscans lived before Rome dominated the peninsula. The collection numbers in the tens of thousands of objects, though only a part is on display at any time.

Now look at the Outer Peristyle. A peristyle is a garden surrounded on all sides by a covered colonnade. This one is long and formal, with that narrow reflecting pool running down the centre. Clipped hedges line the paths. Bronze statues stand along the water. These bronzes are modern copies of sculptures found in the Villa of the Papyri. The originals are in the archaeological museum in Naples. Here, you can see them roughly as a Roman might have seen them, outdoors and in sunlight.

Notice the colours on the walls. Many visitors expect ancient architecture to be white marble. But Romans painted their houses boldly, and they decorated their walls with false columns, painted windows and imaginary views. The designers here used that tradition. Look at the ceilings of the colonnades too. Some have painted patterns that copy Roman originals. The effect is warm and slightly theatrical. It shows that the Romans valued colour, illusion and comfort as much as stone.

Near the main building is the Herb Garden. It is planted with species the Romans used in cooking, medicine and religious ritual. You may find olive trees, pomegranates, figs, grapevines, sage and laurel. Many of these plants grow well in Southern California because the climate here is similar to the Mediterranean. Run a leaf gently between your fingers and smell it. This garden reminds us that a Roman villa was also a working estate, not only a place for art.

Inside the galleries, the objects are arranged by theme. You will find gods and heroes, athletes, animals, and scenes from daily life. There are painted Greek vases, delicate glass, coins, jewellery and portrait heads. One famous piece here is a bronze statue of a young athlete, often called the Victorious Youth. It was found in the sea off the Italian coast in the twentieth century. Italy has asked for its return for many years, and that legal dispute is one reason the statue is so well known.

That dispute points to a wider story. Over recent decades, museums around the world have faced hard questions about where their antiquities came from. The Getty has returned a number of objects to Italy and Greece after investigations showed they had left those countries illegally. As you walk the galleries, look at the labels. Many now describe an object's history of ownership. That information can be as interesting as the object itself, because it shows how ancient art travels in the modern world.

Before you leave, find the outdoor theatre near the entrance. It is built in the shape of a classical Greek theatre, with stone seats rising in a curve. In the late summer, the museum often stages ancient Greek or Roman plays here in the evening. Even on a quiet day, it is worth sitting for a moment. Look down at the stage and then up at the villa facade behind it. The whole complex was planned as a journey, from the modern car park to an ancient world.

As you walk back, stop once more at the edge of a garden. Listen to the fountains, and to the wind moving through the cypress trees. Below the hill, you may catch a narrow blue line of the Pacific. Two thousand years ago, someone stood on a terrace near Naples and looked out at a different sea. This building cannot bring that person back. But for a few minutes, it lets you stand in a similar light, and see a little of what they saw.