Sat 5 May 2007
This week, as well as putting up some new pages on the Mamertine Prison, Piazza Navona and Santa Sabina, I also finally got around to visiting the Ara Pacis.
The Ara Pacis Museum is a strange place. It’s housed in a controversial building designed by the architect Richard Meier, a long white pavilion walled with over 1500 square meters of glass. It seems out of place in Rome, and many people detest it. I actually thought that it wasn’t that bad, but I don’t think it’s being used to its best advantage.
As well as the central room on the first floor, there is also a lower level which is being used partly as a museum for the Ara Pacis itself, and partly as a temporary exhibition space. The museum is interesting and informative, but little thought seems to have gone into the exhibition space. Part of it is hard to find - you have to go round a couple of corners and along a corridor with doors marked “private”, expecting at any moment to be collared by the overattentive security guards. If you do find the space, at the time of writing it was filled with photographs that had no real bearing on the theme of the museum. That’s okay in a freely accessible public space, but in a building which is designed around a specific purpose - and which you must pay to enter - it would be better to use the space to provide more targetted exhibitions. Otherwise, you have people who want to see the Ara Pacis having to pay for irrelevant exhibitions, and people who want to see the photographs having to pay for the Ara Pacis.
Due at least in part to the machinations of Mussolini, the neighbourhood of the Ara Pacis (where it is now - it’s been moved since its rediscovery) is very Augustus-centric. Across the road is the Mausoleum of Augustus, a depressing ruin that doesn’t seem to have anybody looking after it. It might be worthwhile using some of the extra space in the Ara Pacis museum to provide information about the Mausoleum, or about the period of Augustus, or about the Campus Martius - the Mars Field, which as well as being the original site of the Ara Pacis, was also an important training ground for the Roman military and a centre of democratic operations, and could certainly be the basis of an interesting exhibition.
To be fair, this is a very new museum and it’s going to take them a while to find the best use of their space. And the Ara Pacis clearly isn’t one of the major tourist attractions: I bought a guidebook from their bookshop, a lovely, sun-bleached little booklet that seems to have been left over from 1975:
