Herculaneum has a new website worth exploring. The Roman town buried by Vesuvius in AD 79 now has a freely accessible, interactive map that goes well beyond the usual archaeological-site plan. You can examine city blocks, building complexes, the smaller groups of spaces within them, and individual rooms. Then you can turn to old maps, historical photographs, decorative details, and records of the excavations that uncovered the place.

The Herculaneum Archaeological Park announced the public release of its Urban Cadastre on October 9, 2026. The useful link is the interactive Urban Cadastre itself. It is free, and it has considerably more to look at than its rather administrative name suggests.

Start with a city block and work inward

The map is organized in four connected levels. At the largest scale are building blocks, the stretches of city between streets. Inside those are cadastral units, which identify properties or architectural complexes. Functional units gather spaces associated with a particular use. At the finest level are the individual rooms, or environments.

That arrangement makes an interesting way to wander. Find a block and look at how many separate spaces it contains. Follow the outline of a property, then look at its subdivisions. A Roman house is easier to understand when you can see it alongside its neighbors rather than as a named building on a tourist map. The same goes for the relationship between residential and other spaces in the excavated town.

The map covers the excavated urban area and also includes the Villa of the Papyri and the ancient theater. Those last two are worth locating even if most of your browsing happens among the streets and houses.

Try the old maps, photographs, and excavation records

The photographic material may be the most rewarding part for someone who likes archives. The portal provides access to historical photographs and images of the site's decorative elements. A room outline tells you where something is; a photograph can help you see what the archaeologists were recording there.

There are also layers for historical cartography. Put the modern documentation beside an older representation of Herculaneum and you have a different question to pursue: how did successive generations map a town that was being uncovered a little at a time?

For the excavation history, look for the textual records and chronologies of twentieth-century digs. Herculaneum was not revealed in one tidy operation. Different parts were investigated at different times, and earlier records are important to understanding what later scholars inherited.

There is plenty for a more methodical visit, too: statistics describing the site's archaeological and architectural remains, a glossary of architectural and urban terms, a user guide, a bibliography, and a downloadable PDF version of the cadastre. If the terminology becomes bewildering, the glossary is a sensible place to retreat.

And then there is the rest of Herculaneum online

For readers who want to leave the map and inspect the buildings in three dimensions, the park maintains a separate Herculaneum 3D Scan resource, with point-cloud views of the archaeological site and selected houses. It is part of the park's wider digital collection, not a promise that every room on the cadastre has a 3D tour.

The cadastre's geographical information is also offered as open data, through APIs and mapping services. That is more than most casual visitors will need, but it means someone who wants to examine or remap the evidence does not have to stop at the public interface.

The underlying catalog began as a conservation and maintenance project in 2006. Its new public site puts that accumulated documentation in the hands of anyone curious enough to follow a street into a building, and a building into a room. A good first visit needn't be ambitious: open the map, pick a block, and see where its records lead.

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