Mau was born in Kiel, where he read Classical Philology at the University of Kiel, and then at the University of Bonn. He moved to Rome, for reasons of ill-health, in 1872, where he became Secretary to the German Archaeological Institute and catalogued the holdings of its extensive library. His interests lay above all in Pompeii, with inscriptions and Roman wall paintings, where he built upon the earlier work published by Wolfgang Helbig and Giuseppe Fiorelli.
