Photos

A decorated wall at the Getty Villa: Malibu. It's supposed to serve as an optical illusion, and does look rather three-dimensional, as does the false door below it. It took quite a lot of post-processing to get it this straight; I don't know what I did to the photo when I was taking it, but it doesn't look too bad here!

This site was first opened in 1974 as the second Getty museum; the first was at his home, on the same property, where he showed his vast art collection to visitors a few days a week. He then decided to build a reconstruction of the Villa of the Papyri, an immense estate near Herculaneum in Italy, which was destroyed during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. The villa was closed in 1997 for renovation and only re-opened in Jan. of 2006. It now houses an impressive collection of Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities, and also serves as an educational center and library for researchers around the world. There's some controversy surrounding it, however, as the Greek and Italian governments claim that many of the pieces were illegally looted and should be returned. The villa is goregous, however, and is definitely worth a visit, both to see the collection and the architecture.