Villa Kérylos

This guide to Villa Kérylos, on its clifftop above Nice, follows the scholar Théodore Reinach and his wife Fanny as they set out not to build a villa but to reconstruct, correct down to the door hinges, a Greek nobleman's house from the island of Delos. It traces the six years architect Emmanuel Pontremoli spent raising marble columns and laying mosaic floors copied from excavations, and the modern plumbing and wiring the team hid inside walls built to look untouched by time. Listen for how Reinach's fortune connected to the Ephrussi banking family that funded the project.