AS THE GREAT ITALIAN ARCHAEOLOGIST AMEDEO MAIURI LED HIS team in excavating Herculaneum in the mid-twentieth century, they encountered obstacles both modern and ancient. While they dug, they commandeered houses along the alleys of modern Resina, tore them down, and then slowly unveiled the town's ancient predecessor below. This was no small task because the eruption of Mount Vesuvius inundated Herculaneum, entombing it under approximately 20 meters of pyroclastic flow. Digging through the petrified material was expensive and troublesome but full of compensation. An ancient city was coming to life, as houses, bars, bakeries, shops, and splendid public buildings again saw the light of day. By the time World War II slowed Maiuri's excavations, a huge palestra, two sets of baths, a host of elegant seaside mansions, a pair of temples, and much more had been unveiled (Fig. 66). Unfortunately for Maiuri, he was hardly the first to understand Herculaneum's lure. Starting in the early eighteenth century, after townspeople in Resina started pulling up marble from wells, the site drew the interest of the rulers of Naples. Especially influential was the Bourbon royal house, which funded subterranean exploration that tunneled through the city, yielded many treasures to decorate the family's palaces, and was documented intermittently with maps – no small task because the tunnels did not always connect. Maiuri's excavation notebooks often lament the subsequent problems posed by the Bourbon cunicoli, “rabbit holes.” Despite these frustrations, Maiuri's excavations between 1927 and 1961 increased the exposed area fivefold.

The unearthed city of Herculaneum matched and even occasionally outstripped its more famous cousin of Pompeii. For one, Maiuri had seen and even improved on techniques pioneered at Pompeii, such as the preservation of upper floors, because the pyroclastic flows at Herculaneum encased and thus preserved many organic remains. Enclosed within the volcanic matrix were projecting balconies, furnishings of wine shops, beds, and a cradle. And the organic material extends to a nearly singular collection of wooden tablets that Herculaneans kept as documents of legal cases and hearings. As Wallace-Hadrill describes them, the tablets complement the physical “stage” of excavated buildings by granting some idea of the “script” that characters followed.