Oplontis, Villa of Poppaea

Oplontis tickets, with an audio guide on your phone

The ticket we sell gets you into the Villa of Poppaea with an audio guide you download to your phone, so bring your own headphones. It costs €21, and you can cancel it up to 30 days before your visit. To save working out the trains, the option with the return trip from Napoli Centrale costs €31.

Like every ticket for the Pompeii park’s sites, it carries your name and the staff can ask to see ID, so type the name as it appears on your passport. Under-18s go in free, and bags bigger than 30 × 30 × 15 cm can’t come in.

Oplontis and Pompeii on one card: the Campania Artecard

The Pompeii Express doesn’t cover Oplontis, but the Campania Artecard includes both, and Herculaneum as well. The 365 Lite and the 365 Gold include the villa, and the 7-day card counts it as one of its five included sites.

That makes the 365 Lite the version to look at if you’re doing both: our Oplontis ticket at €21 and our Pompeii Express at €27.50 already come to more than the card’s €31, and children don’t need a card, since under-18s go in free. The Naples Museum Card, which has Pompeii, doesn’t list Oplontis, and the other cards are compared on Naples Pass and Naples city passes.

Getting to Oplontis from Naples or Pompeii

From Naples, take the Circumvesuviana, the suburban railway, and get off at Torre Annunziata, where the Sorrento and the Poggiomarino trains both stop; there’s a train from Naples every 10 minutes. The villa is on Via dei Sepolcri, in the town.

If you’re starting at Pompeii, the park’s own shuttle bus, the Artebus, runs out to Oplontis on its line 2 and takes about half an hour. It’s free for anyone with a park ticket, as long as there are seats.

Oplontis opening hours: closed every Tuesday

Oplontis closes on Tuesdays all year, and the Artebus doesn’t run that day either. In winter, from 15 October to 15 March, it opens from 9:00 to 17:00 with the last entry at 16:00; the rest of the year it stays open until 19:00, last entry 18:00. It also closes on 25 December and 1 January.

Inside the Villa of Poppaea: painted walls and a 61-metre pool

Two villas have been dug out at Oplontis, and only one is open. The Villa of Poppaea, also known as Villa A, is the one your ticket covers; Villa B, which belonged to Lucius Crassius Tertius and processed farm produce, above all wine and oil, is closed to visitors.

Villa A was a large seaside residence built in the middle of the 1st century BC and enlarged under the emperors, and it was being restored when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. What it’s known for is its walls: UNESCO picks out the illusionistic frescoes, painted doors, colonnades and gardens that make a flat wall look like a way through to rooms and views beyond.

The pool, 61 by 17 metres, was dug when the villa was enlarged in the middle of the 1st century AD, and dining rooms, guest apartments and small decorated winter gardens open around it. Botanists have worked out what grew in the gardens: box, oleanders, lemon trees, plane trees, olives, cypresses, roses and ivy.

The working side of the house is here too, with the slaves’ quarters set around a peristyle, a courtyard ringed by columns, with a fountain in the middle. Recent excavations have also found a tunnel under the Sarno canal and a covered gallery that once looked over the sea, now collapsed.

Poppaea, Nero and the name Oplontis

Nobody knows for certain who owned the villa. The inscription painted on an amphora suggests it could have belonged to Poppaea Sabina, the second wife of the emperor Nero, and that’s where the name Villa of Poppaea comes from.

Oplontis is what the place was called in Roman times, and Torre Annunziata is the town that grew on top of it. The park describes it as something like a suburb of Pompeii, under Pompeii’s authority. Excavation began in the Bourbon era, and today UNESCO lists the villa in the same World Heritage Site as Pompeii and Herculaneum, calling it the most significant example of a Roman suburban villa.