Boscoreale

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Boscoreale is a modern comune of Campania in the Parco Nazionale del Vesuvio under the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, known for the fruit and vineyards of Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio. The neighborhood, which was overcome by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE that obliterated and preserved its better-known neighbors, Pompeii and Herculaneum, is famous for the frescos of its aristocratic villas, excavated before World War I. A hoard of Roman silver and coins that had been hurriedly stashed in a cistern for protection at the time of the eruption was also recovered in Boscoreale in 1895, and divided among museums, including the Louvre.

Boscoreale, about a kilometer north of Pompeii of which it was an expansive, more rural outlying suburb, was notable in antiquity for having numerous aristocratic country villas and was preserved as a hunting park—hence its name—by the kings of Naples. The villa of P. Fannius Synistor was built and decorated shortly after mid-first century BCE. The quality of its frescos seems to have preserved them from changes in fashion, before the villa was entombed in the eruption.

The neighboring Boscotrecase yielded some elite works of art to excavators at the same time.