Museum
The Getty Villa
17985 Pacific Coast Hwy, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272, USA
Roman-style seaside villa rebuilt from a mansion buried by Vesuvius, filled with Greek and Roman antiquities.
This guide to the Getty Villa traces J. Paul Getty's obsession with a Roman house that no longer existed: the Villa of the Papyri, buried by Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 and rediscovered by eighteenth-century diggers who pulled scroll after scroll of burned papyrus from its ruins. It follows Getty's decision to rebuild that lost villa on a California cliff, breaking ground in 1970 and opening to the public in 1974. From England, Getty approved every acquisition for the collection inside it without ever setting foot on the site during construction.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.