Pompeii at the Naples Archaeological Museum

Most of what the Pompeii excavators found that could be carried is in Naples, in the National Archaeological Museum (MANN). That means the detached frescoes, the floor mosaics from the House of the Faun, the 1:100 scale model of Pompeii built in 1879, the finds from the Temple of Isis, bronze and marble furnishings from the houses, and the bronze statues of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. The papyrus scrolls themselves are not at the MANN: the museum says they are kept and studied at the National Library of Naples. Pompeii keeps the streets and rooms; Naples keeps much of what was inside them.

Rooms at the MANN close and reopen for refurbishment, so we give the state of the galleries once, in the box below (as of 5 November 2026), and nowhere else on this page. Everything else here describes what a section holds, not whether you can walk into it that day.

Go to Pompeii for the rooms and to Naples for what was cut out of them. If a fresco is not on a wall in Pompeii, it is usually in a frame at the MANN.

Start from what you saw, or plan to see, and look it up in Naples. Three pairings explain most of what is out of place on the ground.

The House of the Faun. The Park says the statue of the dancing Faun in the main atrium and the great battle mosaic of Alexander and Darius in the exedra are copies, and that the originals are at the MANN. The house was dug in 1830-1832, and the museum devotes an area of its mosaics section to it. The mosaic is about 5.83 by 3.13 meters, made of more than a million tesserae in opus vermiculatum at the end of the 2nd century BC. It is also the piece with the most visible history; see the timeline below.

The House of the Tragic Poet. The Park's page describes the "Cave canem" mosaic at the main entrance, now behind glass, and says the originals of the house's mosaics and paintings are at the MANN. The Naples museum lists a "Cave canem" (inventory 110666) only as "from Pompeii", with no house named. The Park's page does not say whether the museum's piece is that same mosaic, and the museum does not name a house, so we cannot tell you which is which. Treat them as possibly two objects and check the labels. The big mythological panel from that house, the Sacrifice of Iphigenia, is in the frescoes section.

The Temple of Isis. You will find the building in Pompeii and the fittings in Naples. It was the first religious building excavated at Pompeii, in 1764, and its paintings were so well preserved that it was documented in drawings and engravings. The MANN gallery arranges the wall fragments at their original heights and shows the marble inscription that records the rebuilding after the earthquake of AD 62 or 63, paid for by Numerius Popidius Celsinus.

The MANN's Vesuvian collections are not only Pompeii's. The frescoes section includes Herculaneum's House of the Stags, with still-life panels, and the "knucklebone players" from Herculaneum, and the mosaics section a nymphaeum niche from the House of the Skeleton. The Boscoreale megalographies of the villa of Publius Fannius Synistor, and a sinopia from Oplontis, are there too; for those sites, see our page on Oplontis, Stabiae and Boscoreale.

The Villa of the Papyri section is the strongest argument for a Naples day if you plan to see Herculaneum. The villa stood on the sea with a 250-meter front. The Bourbon engineer Karl Weber directed digging there from 1750 to 1764, through tunnels and wells, because the villa was buried under about 27 meters of hard volcanic rock. The MANN says the bronze sculptures from it are the most significant group of Roman bronzes to have survived, and names the runners, the resting Hermes, the drunken satyr and portraits of kings and philosophers.

Not at the MANN. The museum's own page says the more than 1,800 charred papyrus scrolls found in the villa are preserved and studied at the National Library of Naples. A few were given away in the 18th and 19th centuries; the scroll behind the 2024 breakthrough is kept in Paris, at the Institut de France. What the MANN shows is the story of how people tried to read them, from the machine designed by Abbot Antonio Piaggio in the second half of the 18th century to non-invasive scanning with AI help. In February 2024 the Vesuvius Challenge, an international prize project, awarded its grand prize for reading passages from inside an unopened scroll; its organizers then said roughly 95% of that scroll remained to be read, and the reading has continued since. The Herculaneum Park posts the status of the villa itself on its own page.

There is no official order, and we have no visitor data to prove one. The reasoning is this. Naples first gives you the objects and a map of the city, so the empty rooms in Pompeii have furniture in your head. Pompeii first gives you the places, so the frescoes in Naples have a wall to go back to. If you have only one chance and a long Pompeii day, the museum is the easier half to move: it is indoors and a metro ride from Naples Central Station.

Plan around the museum's weekly closing day, noted in the box above, rather than around the weather. Pompeii does not share that closing day in the Park's timetable, so it is the safer site to book first and the museum the one to fit around it. For the Pompeii half, our itineraries page lays out the options from two hours to two days, and the tickets page lists the museum's ticket structure with prices. The Park's Pompeii ticket does not open the MANN: the Park's list of sites it opens for free with a ticket does not include it, and the museum sells its own.

The museum is at Piazza Museo 19. By its own directions: from Naples Central Station take Metro Line 1 to Museo or Line 2 to Cavour; from the port take Line 1 from Municipio to Museo; from the airport, the Alibus to the Central Station and then the metro. Naples-Pompeii train details are on our getting there page.

The museum's audio guide covers 90 items in 85 minutes, in Italian, English, French, Spanish and German. That is a sensible minimum for a visit built around Pompeii, and the Farnese sculptures, the Egyptian collection and the Villa of the Papyri add more if you have the energy. For accessibility, the MANN says its building can be entered from three sides, that the western entrance at the vehicle gate suits wheelchairs and strollers, that lifts serve only the wing they are in, and that disabled visitors may go to the front of the line; guide dogs are admitted. Our page on Pompeii accessibility covers the site itself.