Despite Weber’s troubles, he is thrilled with the treasures of the villa. The most important is discovered in October 1752. It is a room filled with scrolls of charred papyrus. Papyrus is a plant material used in the ancient world to make paper. This library and its contents suggest a new name for the house: the Villa of the Papyri. (Papyri is the plural of papyrus.)
News of the scrolls travels through Europe. Scholars scramble to learn more. They are desperate to find out what’s written in these ancient books. Charles’s court tries to satisfy them. He brings a priest named Antonio Piaggio to Naples to unroll the scrolls and read the text.
Piaggio gets down to work. At the same time, Camillo Paderni boasts of his role in retrieving the scrolls. Paderni is a scholar at Portici. Charles had placed him in charge of studying the discoveries and drawing images of them. He writes a letter to the Royal Society of London, Great Britain’s most famous science academy. In the letter, he claims responsibility for the find. He writes, “I was buried... for more than twelve days, to carry off the volumes found there; many of which were so perished, that it was impossible to remove them.”
Piaggio, though, uncovers a different story when he interviews those involved in the discovery. He finds out that many of the papyri were destroyed by the workers. At first, they thought the papyri were just pieces of wood. Then they noticed the objects were all the same size. Out of curiosity, they began to unroll them. The workers still could not figure out what they were. But they did know the papyri were not the statues and marbles the king wanted most.
Through his detective work,
Piaggio concludes that Weber
The original bronze statue of a boy (right) found in the Villa of the Papyri is in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, Italy. A copy stands in the Villa of the Papyri.
Saved the scrolls. Weber saw the workers throwing away the paper. He demanded they stop. According to Piaggio, Paderni exaggerated his role in the discovery. In reality, he was in part responsible for the destruction of many of the scrolls. He was the one who had encouraged the workers to ignore everything but major finds.
World History
