The Torlonia marbles described in my post at https://longoio3.com/2021/06/16/a-prince-s-private-collection/
are clearly not the only reason to visit the Capitoline museums. The museums themselves are a treasure trove of marvellous things. But if one can’t be there in person the web site at http://www.museicapitolini.org/en is a very adequate alternative.
The Capitoline Museums constitute the main municipal civic (and, therefore, not national) museum of Rome. Indeed, the two main museum buildings are separated by Rome’s city hall proudly flying the three flags of Rome City, Italy and the EU.
Opened to the public in 1734, under Pope Clement XII, they are considered to be the first public museums in the world; places where art could be enjoyed by everyone and not just by the owners. They are known as museum in the plural as the original collection of ancient sculptures was added to by Pope Benedict XIV in the eighteenth century with a picture gallery consisting mainly of renaissance works illustrating largely Roman subjects.
What grabbed my attention most in the Musei Capitolini?
First, the large glass hall by the architect Carlo Aymonino (who died in 2010) which opened in 2005 and where we find the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, formerly in Piazza del Campidoglio and now sheltered from the weather after its restoration.
The hall also includes the newly restored tufa foundations of the temple of Jupiter Capitoline, perhaps the oldest of all Roman temples.
I was standing on the spot where the great empire was founded, the ‘Campidoglio’. It was on this hill that an encampment of shepherds grew into a village, a town and into one the most iconic cities in the world. There were excellent explanations of this earliest testimony.
And then I saw the captive she-wolf, the symbol of Rome. The story relates that a vestal virgin, Rhea Silvia, was fertilized by the god Mars and gave birth to twins, Romulus and Remus. Their grandfather, Numitor, was expelled from the throne of Alba Longa by his brother Amulius and to prevent the grandchildren, when they became adults, from claiming the usurped throne, Amulius ordered the twins to be thrown into the Tiber in a basket. This basket ran aground on the river at the foot of a hill, where the twins were found by a she-wolf who took care of them until they were found by a shepherd called Faustulus. The she-wolf’s cave is the legendary lupercal on the Palatine hill.
This wolf which dates from Etruscan times looks truly to be a friendly mum and clearly the twins imbibed the strength and boldness which would turn their descendants into the rulers of perhaps the most powerful and greatest empire the world has known.
I though also of all the wolves I had come across in the world: those in London’s Regent’s park and Rome’s Villa Borghese zoos among them: the wolf, which increasingly populates the Apennines around my little house in Tuscany and which can only be big and bad to the local shepherds and their flocks of sheep and goats.
The Wolves in Rome’s Zoo (or Bio-Park)
The classical sculpture section of the museum has such wonders as the Capitoline Venus.
However, I was particularly moved by the agonised expression of the Roman copy of the dying Galatian. The original was a bronze sculpture attributed to Epigones datable to 230-220 BC and probably part of the Donarium (section of a temple where votive offerings are made) of Attalus in the city of Pergamum (which we visited way back in 1991 when reaching Turkey on our Morris Traveller).
Such a lovely Greek horse and ready to gallop away as it has wanted to do ever since the 5th century BC when it was created in bronze by Egea, master of Phidias.
The Pinacoteca (picture gallery) is rich in paintings from the baroque period and it is not difficult to find among them so many familiar pictures.
A passage below the Campidoglio square leads one across to the other palace housing the museum.
Giant piranesiesque vaults reminded me that the palace has been built on the remains of ancient temples.
Looking out from these vast passages I obtained an overwhelming view of the Roman Forum.
As civic museums go I think it would be difficult to find anything to beat the Capitoline Museums. In the area they occupy one can find the origins of Rome, the elegant city planning designs of Michelangelo, the cream of classical sculpture, some of the finest baroque paintings and an unbeatable view of the Forum. What more can one ask of life I wonder?
