📅 From July 4 to August 8, 2025
📍 Herculaneum Archaeological Park
“Fridays at Herculaneum” returns to the Archaeological Park, featuring performances, knowledge and archaeology under the stars
With the 8th edition of the Fridays at Herculaneum series, the Herculaneum Archaeological Park renews one of the most anticipated cultural events of the summer. From July 4 to August 8, 2025, every Friday evening, visitors will be able to experience the unique opportunity of visiting the ancient city, made even more fascinating by the evocative nighttime illumination.
This year’s novelty will be the possibility for visitors to freely explore the illuminated archaeological area in the evening, strolling through the streets, shops and sumptuous domus of ancient Herculaneum, deepening their knowledge of the site thanks to the Digital Herculaneum application, which can be downloaded free of charge on site. Through an itinerary dedicated to the event, the app will provide educational content and accompany visitors along a path enriched by dance performances, theatrical and musical interventions, designed to dialogue in an innovative and evocative way with the archaeological heritage.
The common thread of the summer 2025 events at the Park is the relationship between body and myth, explored from different perspectives. Myth, understood as a corpus of stories and images that nourish the collective imagination, also becomes a language for representing the human body: impulses, desires, metamorphoses.
Starting from these premises, the artistic journey of Fridays at Herculaneum stages these suggestions through different disciplines and languages.
Cercamond Theater Company
Flesh and Ash
A theatrical journey that restores centrality to the body as a living subject, no longer just an object of contemplation. Two scenic tableaux, balanced between myth and irony, will animate the spaces of the Park:
– The myth of Tantalus – Garden of the Hotel House: a tale of challenge to the gods taken from Ovid.
– The grotesque preparation of a banquet – Shops on the Decumanus Maximus: dialogue inspired by Plautine comedy.
Cornelia Dance Company
Corpus Evocans
A site-specific performative journey where the dancers’ bodies evoke the myths and rituals of antiquity, activating a sensory dialogue with the memory of the place. The choreographic gesture becomes ritual, evocation, connection between human and divine.
– Intimacy – Garden of the Central Baths: an intimate solo that explores the vulnerability and strength of the body, accompanied by video projections of bodily details.
– Training – Gymnasium: acrobatic trio that celebrates discipline and effort as a sacred act, evoking the gymnastic practices of the Roman world.
– Offering – Thermopolium: danced ritual with wine, evocation of the cult of Dionysus and the ancestral bond between nourishment and sacredness.
– Remembrances – Shop of the House of Neptune and Amphitrite: a totally corporeal action, connected to background noises that refer to cooking fire, the sound of grain, the fluidity of soups contained in embedded dolia.
Pagus Association
Sound Roots – The Breath of the Earth
An immersive experience conceived by maestro Vincenzo Romano, which combines sound, nature and historical memory. Two sound stations, House of the Grand Portal and Ancient Beach, dedicated respectively to the heartbeat of volcanic earth and the breath of the sea, will guide the audience in a contemporary ritual that interweaves past and present, evoking the emotional and ancestral landscape of the site.