Italian researcher claims to have located Plato’s burial place

An Italian researcher believes he has identified the location of Plato's burial place in Athens by analyzing papyri from Herculaneum.

According to the research, led by the Italian papyrologist Graziano Ranocchia of the University of Pisa, Plato is buried in a in a private area in a garden in the Academy, near a sacred shrine to the Muses.

The Herculaneum papyri are more than 1,800 papyrus scrolls discovered in the 18th century in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, an ancient Roman town, located in the modern-day town of Ercolano, Campania, Italy. They were carbonized when the villa was engulfed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

The extremely delicate condition of the scrolls makes them extremely difficult to read.

The papyri were read using a bionic eye, which detected a thousand new words, which is 30% more than when they were last...