Gimme a Minute! #1 -- The Getty Villa

60 seconds at the Getty
Be sure to click full screen if you are on a computer.  If you're on a smart phone, just hit play.

The Getty Villa is more than a museum, it's kind of like a combination Ancient Roman movie set and  fantasy vacation house.  Home to the J. Paul Getty Museum's antiquities collection, the Villa houses art from ancient Greece and Rome dating from about 6500 BC to 400 AD.  The art is amazing enough, but the actual grounds, gardens and buildings are what I love most.  Built in the early 1970s by architects working hand in hand with J. Paul Getty, the villa is a recreation of a first century Roman country house called the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, Italy.  Yes, THAT Herculaneum ... the one that got buried along with Pompei after Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79.  (Much of the Villa dei Papiri still remains unexcavated, but the Getty Foundation was cool enough to have created this virtual tour of what it was like back when Julius Caesar's father-in-law lived there.)

If you want to experience lifestyles of the ancient rich and famous, just walk around the Getty Villa's tiled walkways and admire the mosaics, fresco paintings, fountains, gardens, and sculptures with creepy eyeballs that are supposedly closer to what the actual ancient sculptors created.  (Although, recent artistic sleuthing has uncovered that ancient Greece and Rome wasn't nearly as classical and monochromatic as we imagine it ... those beautiful, white statues were originally painted!)