Palazzo San Teodoro

This guide to Palazzo San Teodoro in Naples opens inside rooms painted with nymphs, fauns and centaurs in Pompeian red, frescoes that look pulled from a buried villa near Vesuvius but were freshly invented in 1826 for Duke Carlo Caracciolo di San Teodoro. It follows the young Tuscan architect Guglielmo Bechi, consumed by the ruins then being unearthed south of the city, as he imagined an antique Roman interior years before most of Pompeii had been uncovered. The loggia in front of you stacks Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns in the same order as an ancient temple facade. Take a moment at ground level to trace that sequence upward.