Alasdair Palmer, The Sunday Telegraph, October 3 2004

When Vesuvius erupted in 79AD, just about everyone knows that it covered the Roman city of Pompeii in ash. The fact that it also obliterated Herculaneum, Pompeii's smaller neighbour, in an avalanche of boiling mud is less well-known. Herculaneum was closer to Vesuvius and was more deeply buried. By the time the mud cooled and solidified, it had embalmed the town, plus the inhabitants who hadn't managed to escape, below 18 metres of earth. Surprisingly, the effect was to preserve Herculaneum even more perfectly for posterity than Pompeii. The mud seems to have oozed round the houses rather than bulldozing them. Many of the buildings kept their second stories. Glassware which had been packed in straw was intact. Even some of the glass in the windows of the public baths managed to escape being shattered. In one house, a kitchen cupboard was found which contained eggs, bread, salad, cakes and fruit - a lunch for someone that was never eaten. Many of the details of the intricate stone work characteristic of both private and public buildings, along with the stucco, frescos and mosaics which adorned them, were undamaged. More remarkable still, wooden beams and furniture were not destroyed as they were in Pompeii, but rather 'carbonised' by the super-heated mud: turned black and into a sort of charcoal which kept all the decorative features of the original. Less than a quarter of Herculaneum has ever been excavated, and it was only in the 1930s that some of the volcanic material was cleared: before that, there had only been exploratory tunnels dug directly into it. But even the partial investigation has been enough to demonstrate that Herculaneum is an astonishing treasure- trove of material from the Roman world. Unfortunately, many of objects so miraculously preserved by the mud 2000 years ago have recently been destroyed or irreversibly damaged. No new eruption of Vesuvius is to blame. It is not even the fault of the 18th century amateurs who first dug down and discovered Herculaneum. Most of the damage has been done in the last 20 years. Buildings have become overgrown with vegetation and started to collapse, with bits of protruding masonry crashing to earth. The surfaces of frescos have peeled and cracked. Mosaic tiles have fallen off, and huge holes have appeared in irreplaceable masterpieces. Ceilings have fallen in, stucco has rotted, and wooden artefacts - the best preserved, and perhaps the only wooden objects for domestic use to have come down to us from the Ancient World - have been completely pulverised. Far more decay has taken place since 1980 than during the nearly 1900 years when all of Herculaneum lay underneath its protective layer of lava. Herculaneum in the year 2000 was in a worse state than some of the archaeological sites in Bosnia - the only difference being that there hasn't actually been a civil war in the Bay of Naples.

It is not easy to explain how one of Italy's, indeed one of the world's, most important historical sites could have been allowed to degenerate into so parlous a condition. "The culprits," explains Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, head of the British School at Rome, who has written extensively on the site and who is centrally involved in trying to reverse the damage, "are rain and pigeon shit." And the damage they have done is heart-breaking. Rain and ground water seep into the fabric of the buildings and force mosaics to bubble up. The water evaporates through the walls. It leaves a film of minerals and salts behind, which crack the surface and wreak havoc on the masonry and whatever decorates it: fresco, stucco or marble cladding. Pigeon shit now drips down from some of the ceilings and across the walls in long, hideous stripes, each one a miasma of corrosive acid eating away at Herculaneum's irreplaceable heritage.

But why has the site been neglected to the extent that pigeons have been allowed to nest in the roofs of 2000-year-old buildings, and water allowed to dissolve some of their most precious decorative features? Over the past 15 years, larger and larger portions of the site have been closed to the public. The houses which have been locked and marked as 'Chiuso' have not, however, been protected. They have often been used for fly tipping waste and dumping domestic appliances unwanted by the inhabitants of the local town of Ercolano, an unappetising urban sprawl consisting of mostly illegally built tenements which have sprung up since the 1970s.

It is tempting to round up the usual suspects - the Mafia and Italy's notorious predilection for favouring family and friends over merit in hiring personnel - and blame them. It is true that many of the custodians of both Herculaneum and Pompeii turn out to have belonged to the same families since the days of the Bourbon monarchs, who first financed exploration of Herculaneum in the 18th century. On the other hand, the Mafia and its local Neapolitan variant, the Camorra, seems to have had little interest in Herculaneum, or any of its artefacts. The Mafia's effect has largely been indirect: the Government's response to organised crime's hold on the construction industry has been to make the process of awarding contracts so cumbersome, complex and agonisingly slow as to make it almost impossible to engage anyone to do anything.

Italy's arthritic public bureaucracy has certainly taken its toll. Well- intentioned decisions by the government in Rome have, as so often, had the opposite effects to the ones intended. In an attempt to ensure that civil servants were held accountable for their decisions, they were made personally liable for their errors. The result was unfortunately not to ensure that state employees performed their tasks promptly and efficiently. It was to make them pathologically reluctant to take any decisions at all, for fear of ending up in court and being crippled by a suit for damages. Again, European Health and Safety legislation required a level of 'environmental integrity' for maintenance work for which there were neither the funds nor the space to provide: that too worked as a solid incentive for doing nothing.

The Soprintendenza Archaeologica di Pompeii, the agency responsible for maintaining Herculaneum during the early 1990s was not a well-managed institution. What work was done there - and practically none was done - was not adequately documented, or even documented at all. There are store rooms full of pottery, pieces of stone and bits of mosaic - but it is impossible to know where they were found, or where they belong, because no records were kept of the dig which led to them. It is alleged that a JCB digger was used at a depth when workers should have been using only trowels and brushes, with the result that terrible damage was done to the Roman layer of soil and shoreline. The trench dug by the JCB digger filled with water - but the pumps which were supposed to dispose of the water did not work.

In 1995, however, Pietro Guzzo, an internationally respected archaeologist, was appointed to head the Soprintendenza. He arrived determined to stop Herculaneum's relentless degeneration. Professor Guzzo had a core team of skilled an professional staff and a vast workforce he could draw on. His problem was that he could not use them effectively. Unions had negotiated deals with the central government which included measures whose effect was to prevent maintenance workers from doing anything after lunch, and allowed them to choose which site they worked on - with result that there were no blacksmiths or weeders at Herculaneum. The workshops were anyway usually closed because they did not comply with European Health and Safety regulations. There was also a chronic shortage of money. The Italian state showed no sign of being either willing or able to provide the cash needed to stop the rot. That might have been that - another tragic story of an irreplaceable site in Italy being allowed to crumble -- had not Professor Wallace-Hadrill alerted Dr David W Packard to Herculaneum's plight. Dr Packard is a former professor of Greek and Latin and now President of the Packard Humanities Institute. His father was one of the founders of Hewlitt Packard, the company which is to computer printers what Microsoft is to computer software. Eager to see some of Hewlitt Packard's profits go to help maintain historic sites and encourage education, Dr Packard set up the Institute in 1987.

Prof Wallace-Hadrill showed a shocked and appalled Dr Packard round Herculaneum in July 2000. As a result, the Packard Institute agreed to provide more than one million pounds for initial remedial work, with more available to ensure that Herculaneum would be available for future generations. The Packard Institute's money, combined with the expertise from the Soprintendenza, means that the process of saving Herculaneum has now begun. The British School at Rome is a key partner in the project: it is the first time that a private organization has been allowed to operate freely, monitored by the local Soprintendenza, on an Italian government site. That has one immense advantage: it cuts out the cumbersome, and stultifying, procedures of Italian bureaucracy.

Monica Martelli Castaldi is leading the conservation work for the Packard-funded project. Jane Thompson is the Project Manager. They started work a new campaign of emergency works on the site this summer. I went round Herculaneum with them two weeks ago as they explained how much needed to be done. One of the most urgent tasks is to get rid of the pigeons. They plan to do it by bringing in falcons: fat pigeons are their favourite food. Pigeons are very scared of falcons, and it is hoped the pigeons will leave Herculaneum as soon as they see them. The first of the birds of prey should arrive before Christmas. Dr Martelli and Thompson's team have already repaired roofs and protected walls against some of the worst water damage; effective long-term protection, however, requires re-organising the drainage, possibly by repairing and re-using the original Roman cisterns, pipes and drainage wells. They were damaged by the eruption and by subsequent earth movements. Once unblocked, however, the Roman drainage system could remove a large portion of the water which at present ends up evaporating through Herculaneum's walls.

There is great pressure from classical scholars in Europe and America to start a proper excavation of the Villa of the Papyri, which was once owned by Lucius Calpurnius Piso, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. The villa is known to contain a vast library of papyrus manuscripts, many of which remain untouched and un-read under the ground. So far, the primary works unearthed have been some extremely boring literary ruminations from the Epicurean writer Philodemus - his writings have been described by one classicist as 'pedestrian in style, earnest in tone, and uninspired in content' - but the hope is that, when the rest are finally excavated, the Villa's library will contain copies of more interesting Greek and Latin authors, perhaps lost plays of Euripides or lost poems by Virgil.

The Packard project will consider eventually excavating the Villa of Papyri. But as Prof Wallace-Hadrill explains, they will only do so when they can be sure that the whole site has been stabilised. 'It is very easy to do more harm than good', he says. 'We have to make sure that we conserve Herculaneum's legacy in the best possible way for future generations. We know that the papyrus manuscripts are safe where they are, protected by the volcanic material which covers them. We will help remove those manuscripts when everything is in place for doing so - but not before. We know only too well what happens when you rush in."

Only a few years ago, despairing archaeologists who visited the site used to say that the best thing that could happen to Herculaneum would be a new eruption from Vesuvius: then at least it would be safe from further depredations. Now, however, Herculaneum's future seems secure without another eruption - providing, of course, that the Italian central government remains content to allow the combination of American philanthropy, and British and Italian expertise, to continue to work on the site.