Rome has many Museums

Museo di Roma.

Palazzo Braschi houses the Museo di Roma. The magnificent 18th century palace stands in the heart of the Renaissance and Baroque ancient Rome, between Piazza Navona and Piazza Campo dei Fiori. It was commissioned by Duke Luigi Braschi Onesti, whose uncle was Pius VI (Cesena 1717 - Valence 1799), elected pope in 1775.

Now, at the end of a hardworking restoration which has renewed the original magnificence, Palazzo Braschi is a modern museum with splendid external structures and a wonderful court. The oval hall, the main entrance which overlooks via San Pantaleo, leads to the monumental and spectacular staircase with its eighteen red granite columns coming from the gallery built by Caligola on the banks of the Tiber. Along the staircase there are ancient sculptures and fine stuccoes, inspired by Achilles' myth. The great architect Giuseppe Valadier (1762 - 1839) probably contributed to its execution. The original tempera paintings still decorate many rooms.

The Museo di Roma contains a remarkable collection of more than 100,000 works in rotating exhibition, all recounting the evolution of the city in all its aspects. A variety of objects in the museum's collection are connected in many ways to the history of Rome from the Middle Ages to the first half of the 1900s: they are relevant documents of the Capital's topographic, cultural, social, historical and artistic development.

The present exhibition Il Museo racconta la cittą (The Museum tells the story of the city) is only an introduction to a very rich heritage, a story organized in sections, not necessarily in chronological order. The exhibition shows a selection of 400 pieces, including paintings, sculptures, etchings and photographs, furniture and decorative objects, all recently restored.

Museum Capitoline.

The creation of the Capitoline Museums has been traced back to 1471, when Pope Sixtus IV donated a group of bronze statues of great symbolic value to the People of Rome. The collections are closely linked to the city of Rome, and most of the exhibits come from the city itself. Pope Sixtus IV was responsible for the creation of the Capitoline Museum's nucleus when in 1471 he donated to the Roman People some bronze statues that had previously been housed in the Lateran (the She-Wolf, the Spinarius, the Camillus and the colossal head of Constantine, with hand and globe). The return to the city of some traces of Rome's past greatness was made even more important by their collocation on the Capitoline Hill, the centre of ancient Roman religious life and seat of the civilian magistrature from the Middle Ages onwards, after a period of long decline. The sculptures had intitially been arranged on the external fa?ade and courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori. The originary nucleus shortly became enriched by the subsequent acquisition of finds from excavations taking place in the city, all of which were closely linked to the history of ancient Rome.

During the middle of the 16th Century a number of important pieces of sculpture were set out on the Capitoline Hill (including the gilded bronze statue of Hercules from the Boarius Forum, the marble fragments of the acrolith of Constantine from the Basilica of Maxentium, the three relief panels showing the works of Marcus Aurelius, the so-called Capitoline Brutus, and important inscriptions (including the Capitoline Fasti, discovered in the Roman Forum). The two colossal statues of the Tiber and the Nile, currently outside the Palazzo Senatorio, were moved at about the same time to Palazzo del Quirinale, while the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius was brought form the Lateran in 1538 on the wishes of Pope Paul III. The overall layout of the collection was altered in the second half of the XVI century, when the museum acquired an important group of sculptures following Pope Pius V's decision to rid the Vatican of "pagan" images: notable works of art increased the collections thereby adding an aesthetic dimension to their hitherto generally historical nature. With the building of the Palazzo Nuovo on the other side of the square it became possible from 1654 onwards to house in a more satisfactory manner the large collection of works that had been gathering in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, by utilising part of the new building.

The Capitoline Museum, however, was only opened to the public during the course of the following century, after the acquisition, by Pope Clement XII, of a collection of statues and portraits of Cardinal Albani. Pope Clement inaugurated the Museum in 1734. A few decades later, in the middle of the XVIII century, Pope Benedict XIV (who was responsible for the addition of fragments of the Forma Urbis from the Age of Severus, the largest marble street-plan of ancient Rome) founded the Capitoline Picture Gallery, which saw the conflation of two important collections, the Sacchetti and the Pio. Towards the end of the XIX century the collections underwent considerable expansion, following the designation in 1870 of Rome as capital of newly unified Italy, and consequent excavations for the construction of new residential quarters.In order to accommodate the large amount of material emerging from these excavations, new exhibition areas were set up in the Palazzo dei Conservatori with the simultaneous creation of the City Council's own archaeological warehouse on the Caelian Hill. subsequently known as the Antiquarium.

A number of sculptures were housed in an octagonal-shaped pavilion known as the "Octagonal Hall", built for the purpose in the inner garden on the first floor of the Palazzo dei Conservatori. This period, like previous ones, also saw a number of important donations thanks to the generosity of private collectors; we should mention, above all, the Castellani collection of ancient pottery and the Cini collection of porcelain. The Capitoline Coin and Medal Collection was also set up in this period, with the acquisition of a number of important private collections, and with several coins coming to light during archaeological excavations in the city.