Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 04/06/2026 16:39:00

Built to shelter one of the great masterpieces of Roman sculpture, the Ara Pacis Museum stands on the bank of the Tiber in central Rome, housing the reassembled altar of the Augustan peace within a sleek modern building of white travertine, glass and steel. The museum was designed by the American architect Richard Meier and opened in 2006, the first significant new public building in the historic centre of Rome in decades. The altar itself, commissioned by the Roman Senate in 13 BC and dedicated four years later, celebrates the peace established by the emperor Augustus after his victories in Spain and Gaul. The marble enclosure stands four metres high and is decorated on every face with reliefs depicting members of the imperial family in procession, mythological scenes and intricate floral motifs. The figures of Augustus and his family on the long northern and southern friezes, identifiable by their posture, dress and the inscriptions that have come down to us, give an unusually intimate sense of the public face of the Roman dynasty in the years when it was establishing the empire as it would last for more than two centuries. The altar was originally erected in the Campus Martius, but was buried over the centuries and pieced together from fragments scattered across museums and private collections in the early twentieth century, with the reconstruction completed under Mussolini in 1938 for the bimillenary of Augustus birth and the dedication of an earlier pavilion. Meier modern building replaces that earlier pavilion, which had grown dilapidated, and sets the altar in a brightly lit, climate-controlled space with displays explaining the iconography, the history of the reconstruction and the broader artistic context of the Augustan age. The museum sits beside the round mausoleum of Augustus, which has been undergoing a long restoration, and the pairing of the altar and the tomb offers an unusually concentrated glimpse of the visual culture of the first Roman emperor, all within a short walk of the Spanish Steps and the Piazza del Popolo.