Discover Centrale Montemartini

The Centrale Montemartini is the second site of the Capitoline Museums, and it occupies a decommissioned thermoelectric power station on Via Ostiense — the first electricity plant the city of Rome ever built for itself.

What makes it unlike any other museum in the city is that the plant was not cleared out. The steam turbines, the boilers, the vast Franco Tosi diesel engines and the switchgear are all still in place, and the ancient sculpture is arranged among them: portrait heads and funerary reliefs along the engine hall, full-length statues against the boilers. The museum's own founding exhibition was called The Machines and the Gods, which remains the most accurate description of it.

The collection is not a highlight reel assembled for the building. It began in 1997 as an emergency measure — a selection of works moved out of the Capitoline Museums while those were being rebuilt, so that they would not disappear from public view — and the arrangement worked so well that it was made permanent in 2001. Much of what is here had been in storage for years.

It sits about twenty minutes from the centre on Metro line B, in a quarter built for gasworks and markets rather than for visitors, and it closes on Mondays when most of Rome's civic museums do not.

The Centrale Montemartini is the second site of the Capitoline Museums, and it occupies a decommissioned thermoelectric power station on Via Ostiense — the first electricity plant the city of Rome ever built for itself.

What makes it unlike any other museum in the city is that the plant was not cleared out. The steam turbines, the boilers, the vast Franco Tosi diesel engines and the switchgear are all still in place, and the ancient sculpture is arranged among them: portrait heads and funerary reliefs along the engine hall, full-length statues against the boilers. The museum's own founding exhibition was called The Machines and the Gods, which remains the most accurate description of it.

The collection is not a highlight reel assembled for the building. It began in 1997 as an emergency measure — a selection of works moved out of the Capitoline Museums while those were being rebuilt, so that they would not disappear from public view — and the arrangement worked so well that it was made permanent in 2001. Much of what is here had been in storage for years.

It sits about twenty minutes from the centre on Metro line B, in a quarter built for gasworks and markets rather than for visitors, and it closes on Mondays when most of Rome's civic museums do not.

An early twentieth-century industrial building, designed by the engineer Corrado Puccioni and put up in the first years of the 1900s on Via Ostiense. It is a working plant rather than a civic monument: tall halls lit from clerestory windows, steel roof trusses, overhead travelling cranes on gantries, and interior volumes sized to the machinery rather than to people.

The siting was an engineering and tax decision, and it explains the whole quarter. The plant went up in a deliberately industrial zone — the general markets and the Gazometro are its neighbours — close to the Tiber for the continuous water supply a thermoelectric station needs, and close to road and rail. It also stood outside the cinta daziale, the city customs boundary, which meant its fuel escaped duty.

The building has three principal interiors and they were built at different times. The Column Hall and the engine and boiler halls come from the original plant and its interwar expansions; the Boiler Room in particular exists because a third turbine was added in the late 1930s and needed housing. That is why the rooms differ so much in proportion.

The museum design is a deliberate collision rather than a conversion. The restoration kept the turbines, boilers, engine blocks and switchgear in place and set the sculpture among them, rather than stripping the halls back to neutral gallery space. The machines are not backdrop: they hold their own floor area, their own labels and their own scale, and the classical figures are placed to be read against them.

It was built as infrastructure, on a site chosen for water, transport and tax. Designed by the engineer Corrado Puccioni and raised in the first years of the twentieth century, the plant was inaugurated by mayor Ernesto Nathan on 30 June 1912, with generation starting the next day. It was the first station of the brand-new Azienda Elettrica Municipale, the municipal electricity company that became Acea. The Via Ostiense location was picked because the quarter was already industrial, because the Tiber could supply the continuous water a thermoelectric plant consumes, because road and rail ran past — and because the site lay outside the city customs boundary, so its fuel was not taxed.

The machinery was replaced and added to twice, and both campaigns are still in the room. The original installation paired steam turbines and boilers with Franco Tosi diesel engines from Legnano, the turbines carrying continuous load and the diesels cutting in at peak demand. On 21 April 1933 two Tosi diesels of 7,500 HP each replaced the earlier, weaker units — those are the blocks the statues now stand between. At the end of the 1930s, with demand rising ahead of the 1942 Universal Exposition, a third steam turbine of 20,000 kW went in, together with two Tosi-Steinmüller boilers rated at 45 atmospheres, and that addition was large enough to require an entirely new boiler hall. The Exposition never happened. The hall did, and it is now where much of the best sculpture stands.

The plant survived the war because one man refused to dismantle it. It escaped Allied bombing, and in 1943, during the occupation of Rome, Corrado Puccioni — by then Acea's general manager, and the engineer who had designed the place thirty years earlier — was forced to resign for opposing the transfer of its machinery to Germany. The equipment stayed, and the Montemartini was left as the only generating station the city could depend on.

Then it was switched off and left, which is why so much of it survives. After fifty-six years the plant was obsolete and uneconomic, and it was decommissioned in 1968. Roughly thirty years of abandonment and assorted uses followed. Crucially, it was never gutted and re-equipped: a building that is simply shut down keeps its fittings in a way that a building kept in service does not.

Its conversion was an emergency that became permanent. Acea restored the historic plant and adapted its spaces for museum use; then, with the Capitoline Museums undergoing major renovation, the Sovrintendenza Capitolina needed somewhere to keep sculpture in public view. The halls were large, and some of the giant machinery was still standing in them — which made the building a place to try something rather than merely a place to store things. The Machines and the Gods opened in October 1997. Public and specialist response was strong enough that the temporary experiment became a permanent museum in 2001, since when new spaces and works long held in storage have been added — most recently, in November 2016, a hall for the carriages of the Train of Pius IX.

What is the Centrale Montemartini? The second site of the Capitoline Museums, housed in Rome's first municipal power station on Via Ostiense. Ancient sculpture is displayed among the plant's original turbines, boilers and diesel engines, which were left in place.

Is it open on Mondays? No. It opens Tuesday to Sunday, 9.00 to 19.00, and the Monday closure is unusual among Rome's civic museums — the Capitoline Museums, Trajan's Market and the Ara Pacis all open daily.

What does it cost? €11.00 full and €6.50 reduced for the museum, same-day at the desk with no fee; buying ahead adds €1. Exhibition combinations cost more and change with each show. Free for Rome residents, MIC cardholders, and visitors with disabilities plus one companion.

Is the Capitolini Card worth it? If you are visiting the Capitoline Museums as well, yes — it covers both for seven days, which also means you need not do them on the same day.

How do I get there? Metro line B to the Ostiense area, then a short walk to Via Ostiense 106. It is roughly twenty minutes from the centre and is not within walking distance of the main sights.

Is it accessible? Thoroughly. Every exhibition level is accessible, with lifts from the ground floor, a barrier-free path from the street, a LOGES tactile route, Braille lift buttons with voice announcements, tactile panels, audio descriptions and Italian Sign Language content in the museum app, and wheelchairs available on request.

How long does it take? About ninety minutes.

Why is it called Montemartini? After Giovanni Montemartini, the alderman responsible for Rome's municipal-ownership policy, who died during a city council debate in 1913. The plant was named for him the same year.