Museo dell'Ara Pacis

Augustus's Senate voted it for his safe return from Gaul and Spain; the Tiber buried it for centuries; the fascist regime reassembled it in 1938; Richard Meier's glass hall now shelters it. The Ara Pacis is at once a masterpiece of Augustan carving and a monument to the era of every recovery.

Why it matters

Few Roman monuments carry so much history in so little stone. The Ara Pacis Augustae — the Altar of Augustan Peace — is a small marble enclosure, yet its reliefs form the fullest surviving image of the ideology that underpinned the Augustan settlement: piety, family, fertility and the peace that followed civil war. Augustus himself introduces it in the Res Gestae, recalling that the Senate decreed an altar to Augustan Peace in the Campus Martius when he returned from Gaul and Spain, with an annual sacrifice by magistrates, priests and Vestal Virgins. Buried under metres of Tiber silt, forgotten, then excavated piecemeal over four centuries, the altar reached its present home in a building the city treats as a landmark in its own right — the first major work of contemporary architecture raised in Rome's historic centre in generations, designed by Richard Meier & Partners.

What to notice

Walk the enclosure slowly, because the carving runs on two registers. The lower band is pure ornament — vegetal spirals with swans, the birds sacred to Apollo — while the upper band divides into myth on the entrances and ceremony elsewhere. On the west side, one panel shows the she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus before Mars and the shepherd Faustulus beneath the fig tree; the facing relief has an elderly Aeneas in priestly veil sacrificing to the Penates, though the site notes a minority reading that identifies the figure as Numa Pompilius. On the north and south flanks runs the famous procession: lictors, priestly colleges, magistrates, then members of Augustus's family, moving in a crowded line whose living identities remain scholarly conjecture — the museum itself offers two readings, the return ceremony of Augustus or the ritual delimitation of the altar's space in 13 BC. Inside, four steps rise to the altar proper, its side parapets crested with vegetal volutes and winged lions, its drains still channeling rainwater outward as designed.

Context and history

The altar stood near the via Flaminia at the edge of the northern Campus Martius, until Tiber floods buried it so thoroughly that all memory of its position was lost. Fragments surfaced early: an engraving made before 1536 records a re-emerged slab, and in 1566 Cardinal Giovanni Ricci da Montepulciano bought nine sculpted blocks. Work under Palazzo Fiano in 1859 glimpsed the base without extracting it; in 1903, after Friedrich von Duhn identified the monument, an excavation under Edoardo Almagià's consent recovered fifty-three fragments before groundwater halted it. The decisive campaign came in 1937-38, decreed by the Council of Ministers for the bimillenary of Augustus's birth: between June and September 1938 dig and construction raced together, and Mussolini inaugurated the reassembled altar in a pavilion by architect Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo on 23 September 1938. That structure was later replaced; its Res Gestae wall is the sole survivor, and Meier's complex — a linear arrangement of entrance gallery, glass pavilion and conference wing with a terrace facing the Mausoleum of Augusto — now frames the altar in natural light.