City
Oplontis
Torre Annunziata
Listen to the story
Oplontis was a villa settlement on the Campanian coast road from Naples past Herculaneum to Pompeii, at today's Torre Annunziata, where the roads to Salerno and to Stabiae parted. The map marks it with a small drawing of a sizeable farmstead, though a crease in the parchment has swallowed one letter of its name. Excavations have revealed two grand villas, one belonging to the family of the Poppaei. Scholars once suspected the name was a garbled Greek note meaning 'the perished', written beside the buried cities, but the drawn building suggests a real place.