This was a minimum-effort book that I cannot really recommend.

I expected an informative booklet that included a general, site-wide history as well as a house-by-house overview of the buildings uncovered in Herculaneum, with details about the various frescoes and mosaics. I also wanted lots of illustrations. Technically, that is what I got, except that the execution is not up to snuff.

While the illustrations are (mostly) great, the contents and the execution as a whole are fairly shoddy. The texts do tick off the points that the authors wanted to mention, but they read like barely-edited bulleted lists that would need at least one additional round of revisions to turn them into proper texts that guide readers through the information. The general overview section in particular is guilty of this: portions of it consist of almost unordered series of paragraphs, which makes the text a chore to get through. Also, some of the bits that would have fit better in the general overview were buried in the sections for individual houses.

The messy text was not improved by the writing style, which is very Italian (i.e. less analytical and less rigidly structured than English-language academic texts), and especially the English, which honestly was pretty bad in places, and which made several of the individual paragraphs borderline-incomprehensible, too. Sometimes, the Latin, Italian and English versions of a single term were used in the same paragraph, which doesn't improve clarity, either.

And finally, there are layout issues as well: Legends in illustrations appear to have been done in text boxes that sometimes cover parts of the actual illustration!

All of these problems tell me that there was no strong editor to pull together the various sections into a more unified work. It seems like hastily-produced rush-work, which is a shame, really.

So yeah: this book is not something I’m happy to have spent money on. It’s not the worst booklet aimed at tourists I’ve seen, but I wouldn’t recommend picking this up. ( )