After decades of being hidden, the legendary Torlonia Collection, considered among the world’s most important private collections of Greek-Roman classical art, will be on display in Rome as of October 14, Dailymail reported.
Newly-restored exhibition space in Rome’s Capitoline Museums, Palazzo Caffarelli, will display 92 pieces from the priceless collection.
Among the pieces on view is a fountain basin carved in ancient Greece that was believed to have stood in the garden of Julius Caesar when it was already considered an antiquity.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CGNus8aKVZe/
The pieces belong to the aristocratic Torlonia family and represent a fraction of their 620 sculptures, believed to be the largest such private collection in the world.
“The reappearance of such a legendary collection is a very important event,” said art historian Salvatore Settis, who was picked by the family to help curate the show. “When I saw them for the first time it was very emotional because I knew most of those pieces from books, but I had never seen them.”
Anna Maria Carruba helped prepare the statues for the exhibition. “Many of these pieces were already restored from 1600 onwards. We didn’t need to work on the structure of the statues but only on the surfaces, cleaning them, removing the dust that had accumulated over the years and materials used in previous restorations,” she said.
The exhibit will be open until June 29, and is expected to tour to another European country and the United States before returning to Italy where it will be given a permanent home.
For full exhibition details please visit Musei Capitolini website.
