Capitoline Museums site features

The Capitoline Museums are two palaces facing each other across a square, not a single building. The Palazzo dei Conservatori and the Palazzo Nuovo stand opposite one another on Piazza del Campidoglio, the square designed by Michelangelo — so the visit crosses the open air, and the two wings answer each other across it.

In the middle of that square is a horseman, and he is a copy. The statue of Marcus Aurelius was replaced by a copy in 1996, which the museums describe as perfectly compliant in terms of volumes but not in terms of gilding. It holds the centre of the paving without catching the light the way the original did.

The courtyard is where the scale announces itself, in pieces. Colossal fragments are set against the walls — a head, a hand, a foot at a size that makes sense of nothing around them. Since 6 February 2024 a full-scale reconstruction of the Colossus of Constantine stands in the gardens of Villa Caffarelli, which is the first chance most visitors get to see what the fragments belonged to.

Inside, one bronze is the city's own emblem. The Capitoline Wolf is believed to be an Etruscan work of the fifth century BC, and the detail that reorders the whole image is that the original statue did not include the twins — Romulus and Remus were added later, beneath an animal made without them.

Rooms of portrait heads give way to single famous objects. The Capitoline Brutus; statues of Julius Caesar and the Navarch; the Lex de imperio Vespasiani as an inscribed bronze; the Mosaic of the Doves; Caravaggio's San Giovanni Battista; and three large high-relief panels of scenes from the life of Marcus Aurelius, bought in 1515.

One medieval piece is easy to walk past and worth stopping for. Arnolfo di Cambio's Portrait of Charles I of Anjou, of 1277 — recorded as the first lifelike portrait of a living person sculpted in Europe.

Then the route goes underground and the view changes completely. The Tabularium beneath the complex had already been chosen as the seat of the Municipality of Rome in 1144, making it the oldest town hall in the world. Its arches look out over the Roman Forum, so you pass from a gallery of marble heads to an opening onto the ruins without going back outside.

A newer wing was cut in to hold the horseman's original. The Exedra of Marcus Aurelius was added in 2005: a tall top-lit hall, modern and plain against everything else.

It is open longer than most of Rome. Every day, 9.30 to 19.30, with last admission an hour before closing — and the institution has been public since 1734, when Clement XII opened it, which makes it the oldest public museum in the world. The collection itself goes back to 1471 and a donation of ancient bronzes by Sixtus IV.

The Capitoline Wolf

Rome's symbol, a bronze she-wolf that has just given birth. Long believed an Etruscan work of the fifth century BC; the twins Romulus and Remus were added in the fifteenth century and are attributed to Antonio del Pollaiolo. Some restorers have since argued the wolf itself is medieval, of the twelfth century, and the question is not settled — which makes it a more interesting object, not a lesser one.

The equestrian Marcus Aurelius

The original bronze, indoors since 1996. It survived the Middle Ages because it was mistaken for Emperor Constantine, and so escaped being melted down; the one in the square is a copy matched in volume but not in gilding.

The Colossus of Constantine

Fourth-century fragments in the courtyard — the head, a hand, a foot, a kneecap — from a seated figure that stood in the Basilica of Maxentius. Since February 2024 a full-scale reconstruction has stood in the gardens of Villa Caffarelli, which is what makes the fragments comprehensible.

The Dying Gaul and the Spinario. The first is among the most copied sculptures in Europe; the second, a boy pulling a thorn from his foot, came from the founding 1471 gift.

Arnolfo di Cambio's Portrait of Charles I of Anjou, of 1277. The first lifelike portrait of a living person sculpted in Europe to survive from the post-classical era. It is a genuinely startling object to meet in a room of Roman marble.

The picture gallery and the Mosaic of the Doves

The Pinacoteca Capitolina holds a Caravaggio — the St John the Baptist — among Venetian and Baroque painting. The Mosaic of the Doves is Roman and among the finest surviving examples of its kind.

The Lex de imperio Vespasiani and the Capitoline Brutus,

Both acquired in the second half of the sixteenth century, alongside the statues of Julius Caesar and the Navarch.