Musei Capitolini

The world's public museums have an address, and it is the top of the Campidoglio. Since Pope Sixtus IV gave bronze antiquities to the Roman People in 1471, the two palaces facing Michelangelo's piazza have collected the ancient city's image of itself — the She-wolf, the emperors, the marbles — and opened them to everyone in 1734.

Why it matters

The Capitoline Museums began as a political gift: in 1471 Sixtus IV solemnly donated to the Roman People a group of bronze antiquities of great symbolic value, transferred from the Lateran — the She-wolf, the Spinario boy pulling a thorn from his foot, the Camillo, and the colossal bronze head and hand of Constantine. Displayed on the facade and in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, they made the Capitoline hill the stage on which Rome exhibited its antiquity to itself. Growth followed the piazza: Paul III had the gilded equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius brought from the Lateran in 1538, the Fasti Capitolini inscriptions arrived from the Roman Forum, and the river gods Tiber and Nile came down from the Quirinale. The decisive step came under Clement XII, who acquired Cardinal Albani's collection of statues and portraits and inaugurated the Capitoline Museum, open to the public, in 1734 — the moment most histories treat as the birth of the public museum. Benedict XIV then founded the picture gallery in the mid-eighteenth century with the Sacchetti and Pio collections.

What to notice

Plan the two palaces as a conversation. In the Palazzo dei Conservatori, start with the bronzes that started everything — the fifth-century BC She-wolf nursing the twins, cast by the lost-wax technique, and the Constantine fragments that show the scale of the Basilica of Maxentius colossus — then climb to the courtyard where the colossal marble remains stand. The equestrian Marcus Aurelius, moved indoors to save it from weather, holds the centre of its own hall, with the original now protected and its copy in the piazza outside. In the Palazzo Nuovo, the gallery of emperors and philosophers lines a hall with the portraits the Albani collection supplied, while the Capitoline Brutus and the mosaic of the doves reward a slow circuit. The picture gallery holds Caravaggio's "San Giovanni Battista", Domenichino's "Cumaean Sibyl" and Cavalier d'Arpino's "Battle of the Horatii and Curiatii", and the fragments of the Severan Forma Urbis, the great marble map of ancient Rome, hang where Benedict XIV placed them. Between the palaces, the hill's terraces keep the Forum in view below.

Context and history

Michelangelo designed the piazza and its palaces around the middle of the sixteenth century as one organic composition — facades, sculptures and pavement conceived together — though execution stretched across the following centuries, with the Palazzo Nuovo completed opposite from 1654 to balance the ensemble. The museum's character shifted twice: when Pius V removed "pagan" statuary from the Vatican in the later sixteenth century, the Capitoline collections gained their sculptural core; and when Clement XII joined the Albani statues to the hill's bronzes in 1734, the collection crossed from papal display to public institution. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries extended the complex through excavations under the palaces and the "Grande Campidoglio" concept that binds the piazza, the palaces and their storerooms into one museum. Today the museums anchor Rome's civic museum system, with their second site in the Ostiense power station operating as a separate destination.