On a Malibu cliff above the Pacific, the Getty Villa is a faithful reconstruction of a Roman country villa, built to house ancient Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art, and one of the most unusual museums in the United States. J. Paul Getty opened the original ranch house here as a museum in 1954, and when his collection outgrew it, he commissioned a full-scale recreation of the Villa dei Papiri, a first-century Roman villa buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, which had been partially excavated in the eighteenth century. The villa opened in 1974 with the full architectural program of colonnaded gardens, reflecting pools, painted frescoes, and marble floors surrounding a collection of more than 44,000 antiquities.
Getty himself never visited; he refused to fly and died in England in 1976 before the villa was complete. The grounds alone are worth the visit: the Main Peristyle Garden with its long reflecting pool, the herb gardens, and the terraces above the Pacific create an experience of ancient Rome transplanted to the California coast. Admission requires an advance reservation and is free.