In an attempt to recover the lost works of Aristotle, Sophocles and Catullus, archaeologists are to restart excavations at the ancient city of Herculaneum in Italy, where a Roman library lies buried beneath 90 ft of lava from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

"It is impossible, absolutely impossible, to excavate Villa dei Papyri without finding fantastic things. We may find the lost scrolls of Aristotle, or we may find something even more exciting that we had not even thought of yet," Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, the Director of the Herculaneum Conservation Project, told The Daily Telegraph.

The enormous villa, just outside Herculaneum, belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso who's Julius Caesar's father-in-law. Around 1,800 scrolls of middling importance have been found since the library was discovered 250 years back.

Archaeologists have only recently discovered two extra floors to the building but the work on the site halted in 1999 because of fears about the conservation of the site.

"The parts we have excavated so far are only around a third of the entire site. But it is a bit difficult to expropriate the land to excavate the Villa dei Papyri, since it lies underneath the modern town hall.

"Many of the cellars of the modern houses are only a metre or so above the Ancient Roman ruins," Wallace-Hadrill was quoted as saying.

The new excavation work will be funded by a 1.5 million pounds grant from the Packard Humanities Institute, founded by a scion of Hewlett Packard computer empire. The work is being funded by a two-million-pounds-a-year grant from the European Union and the Region of Campania.

"We know what is underneath because of tunnels dug in the 18th century, which brought up all sorts of statues and frescoes," Wallace-Hadrill said.