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Ancient Rome to il Massimo (the Max)
Rome's Palazzo Massimo alle Terme houses the best collection of the Museo Nazionale Romano, a treasure trove of ancient sculptures, frescoes, and mosaics
Opened in June 1998, this museum (paired with its sister collections in the nearby Baths of Diocletian and Aula Ottagona, and in the Palazzo Altemps, near Piazza Navona) simply blows away anything else you'll find in Rome when it comes to Classical-era statues, frescoes, and mosaics.
It's a veritable "Where have you been all my life?" experience for antiquities buffs, and promises an aesthetically pleasant and informative afternoon even for the mildly curious.
MNR Branches
Palazzo Massimo
Palazzo Altemps
Baths of Diocletian
Aula Ottgona This 19th-century palazzo near Termini houses a fully modernized museum of advanced lighting systems, explanatory placards in English, and a curatorial attention to detail heretofore unseen on the dusty old Roman museum scene.
There are no boring ranks of broken marble busts here—portrait busts there are aplenty, but most are masterworks of expression and character, representing famous Romans and giving you an opportunity to put marble faces to the names of all those emperors and other ancient bigwigs.
Among them is a statue of Augustus Caesar wearing his toga pulled over his head like a shawl, a sign he had assumed the role of a priest (actually, of the head priest, which in Latin is Pontifex Maximus, a title the Christian popes would later adopt).
Also on the ground floor are an altar from Ostia Antica whose reliefs bear a striking resemblance to 15th-century frescoes of the Nativity, and a hauntingly beautiful 440 BC statue of a wounded Niobid, collapsing as she reaches for her back where one of Apollo and Artemis' spiteful arrows struck.
Among the masterpieces up on the first floor are a discus thrower, a bronze Dionysus fished out of the Tiber, bronze bits from ancient shipwrecks on Lake Nemi, and an incredibly well-preserved sarcophagus featuring a tumultuous battle scene between Romans and Germanic barbarians (all from the AD 2nd century).
Up on second floor are Roman frescoes, stuccoes, and mosaics spanning the 1st century BC to the AD 5th century, most never seen by the general public since they were discovered in the 19th century. You can visit only via a 45-minute guided tour at the time specified on your ticket.
The frescoes and stuccoes are mainly countryside scenes, decorative strips, and a few naval battles, all carefully restored and reattached into spaces that are faithful to the original dimensions of the rooms from which they came.
Also up here are halls and rooms lined with incredible mosaic scenes, among them the famous Four Charioteers standing with their horses in the four traditional team colors (red, blue, green, and white) that would run the races around the Circus Maximus.
There are also several rare, AD 4th-century opus sectile (marble inlay) scenes from the Basilica of Giunio Bassa.
The basement has two sections. The first contains ancient jewelry, gold hair nets, ivory dolls, didactic CD-ROM consoles, and the mummy of an eight-year-old girl.
The second is an oversized vault containing Rome's greatest numismatic collection. It traces Italian coinage from ancient Roman Republic monies through the pocket change of Imperial Rome, medieval Italian empires, and Renaissance principalities, to the Italian lira, the Euro, and a computer live feed of the Italian stock exchange.
Largo di Villa Peretti (where Piazza del Cinquecento—the giant square outside Termini—meets Via Viminale)
To get info: tel. 06-4890-3500, www.archeorm.arti.beniculturali.it
To book tickets: tel. +39-06-3996-7700, www.pierreci.it
Closed Mondays
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This article was last updated in January 2007. All information was accurate at the time.
Copyright © 1998–2008 by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved.
