The Roman villa at Oplontis, which may have belonged to the family of Poppaea, the second wife of the emperor Nero, had a rich array of sculptures arranged mainly as decorative features in the large gardens.

The excavations carried out in the second half of the twentieth century led to the discovery of a group of nineteen sculptures that once adorned the garden. The sculptures were found during different phases of the excavation and were mainly clustered around three points of the villa  in the places where they had been displayed in antiquity, except for seven of them which were not in their original position at the time of discovery.

For the very first time, the new layout enables visitors to appreciate the sculptures on the tour of the site, providing permanent visibility for most of the works which are normally kept in storage or displayed only in exhibitions. In order to ensure their preservation, it was not possible to place the sculptures in their original position because they would have been outdoors. It was therefore decided that they should be arranged in sheltered parts of the villa in close contact with the places where they were buried by the eruption of AD 79.

All the bases have been designed to evenly distribute the weight on the underlying mosaic, the extendable legs allow them to adapt to the strong irregularity of the ground.