Getty Villa

For the typical visitor, the newly-reopened Getty Villa is perhaps the most exquisite of all possible venues for viewing ancient works of art and craft - reason enough to plan a visit.  For students of architecture and design, however, there's much more, particularly the opportunity to immerse yourself in the living, breathing environment of a classic Roman villa and its abundant amenities. The Getty Villa site encompasses 64 acres of a rugged canyon rising above the Pacific Ocean in Malibu, Calif., and was once home to oil tycoon J. Paul Getty.  A fanatical collector of Greco-Roman antiquities, he dedicated part of his original ranch-style home as a public museum in 1954.  By 1974, less than a year before his death, he had completed and opened the original Villa on another part of the estate, realizing his ambition of creating a public monument dedicated to the arts.   The Villa's layout was inspired by the Villa dei Papiri, a first-century country house in Pompeii buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D.  It was Getty's vision to display his collection in a setting evocative of its contents' historic origins and he realized it, but there were compromises:  The spaces were crowded, and the works on display also included samples of paintings and craftworks of much more recent vintage - Renaissance masters, baroque furnishings and other distinctly non-classical artworks. The Villa closed in 1997 at about the same time the