For visitors to Pompeii, they are a guaranteed crowd pleaser: erotic frescoes, including one of Priapus, the god of fertility, adorning the walls of a 2,000 year old Roman villa.

Or rather they were until two years ago, when the House of the Vettii closed for a restoration project which was supposed to last a year but which still grinds on, the villa encased in scaffolding and a sign outside offering no indication of when it might reopen.

Pompeii may be the best preserved Roman city in the world, thanks to the volcanic ash from nearby Mt Vesuvius which smothered it after a catastrophic eruption in AD79, but critics say years of neglect and indifference have turned it into an international embarrassment and an emblem of the dysfunction which plagues so much of Italian public life.

Exquisite frescoes are scarred with modern graffiti, weeds are growing out of painted walls and there is a dearth of interpretive signs....