Ara Pacis

The Museo dell'Ara Pacis is on Lungotevere in Augusta, at the corner with via Tomacelli, 00186 Rome. The main entrance to the pavilion is the one on the lungotevere. The temporary exhibition space has its own door at via di Ripetta 180, and the auditorium is at number 190. You can get there by metro line A, stops Spagna or Flaminio, and from there it's a little under 10 minutes on foot: from Spagna along via dei Condotti and via Tomacelli, or from Flaminio down from Piazza del Popolo along via di Ripetta. The surface lines that serve the area are the 70, 81, 87, 119, 280, 492, 628, 990 and C3. The museum is open every day from 9.30 to 19.30, with last admission one hour before closing. It's closed on May 1 and December 25, while on December 24 and December 31 it closes at 14.00. The ticket for the museum alone costs 14,00 euro full price and 8,50 euro reduced. Residents of Rome and the Metropolitan City enter free by showing their identity card at the ticket desk, and the same free admission applies to anyone who has a MIC card. The video guide costs 6,00 euro, the audio guide 4,00 euro, and the museum app is free for iOS and Android. Pre-purchasing online or through the call center at 060608 comes with a 1 euro presale fee, and tickets bought this way are non-refundable and can't be changed. For groups of five people or more, booking at the same number is free. When an exhibition is on, prices change, so it's worth checking the combined ticket on the official site arapacis.it before getting in line.

This guide is part of the collection on museums in Rome, and it's worth reading together with the one on the Mausoleum of Augustus, which stands 70 paces away and belongs to the same idea of the city.

What Is the Ara Pacis Augustae

The Ara Pacis Augustae is a monumental altar in Luni marble, enclosed within a quadrangular precinct that is entirely carved. The Roman Senate decreed it in 13 BC, and it was consecrated in 9 BC. It is not a temple, not a mausoleum, and not an arch. It is an open-air altar, that is, a place of sacrifice, protected by a stone wall stylized to look like a wooden enclosure. This distinction, which seems like textbook pedantry, is the key to understanding everything else. Whoever entered the enclosure climbed a flight of nine steps, found the table of the actual altar in front of them, and cut the throat of a victim there. Those who stayed outside saw only the outer walls, and it is on those walls that Augustus played the most skillful game of his long career as a communicator.

The measurements are modest, and it's worth keeping them in mind before you enter, because almost everyone imagines it bigger. The enclosure measures 11,65 meters by 10,62, the height is 3,68 meters, and the two doors on the short sides are 3,60 meters wide. It's an object you can take in at a single glance. The decorated surface, however, is vast: reliefs on the outside and inside, a figured frieze at the top, a carpet of acanthus scrolls at the bottom, a meander band separating them, four Corinthian pilasters at the corners, and four more on the sides of the doors. In the scenes, depth is achieved by varying the thickness of the relief, not with perspective. The figures in the foreground project, while those in the background barely emerge from the marble. It's a Greek craft applied to Roman content.

The monument is one of the most important surviving testimonies of Augustan art, and it served to say one thing, repeated in four different ways: that peace had returned, that a man had brought it, and that this man descended from the gods. The Pax it speaks of is not a feeling, it's a deity. The Romans deified abstractions with a naturalness that strikes us as strange today: Concordia, Salus, Fortuna and Victoria had temples, priests and calendars. Peace got an altar, and it got one at the exact moment Rome was finishing a civil war that had lasted 20 years.

The Senate's Decree of 13 BC and the Consecration of 9 BC

The two dates to remember are July 4 of 13 BC and January 30 of 9 BC. The first is the date of the decree: the Senate resolved to erect an altar to Augustan Peace in the Campus Martius, and established that magistrates, priests and Vestal Virgins would perform a sacrifice there every year. This is not a modern reconstruction. Augustus himself tells it in the Res Gestae, the autobiographical account he had engraved in bronze in front of his own Mausoleum, in chapter 12. Among all the sources on the Ara Pacis, this is the most solid, because it is contemporary and because it comes from the patron.

Augustus's Return from Spain and Gaul

The occasion for the decree was the prince's return from a three-year campaign in Spain and southern Gaul, a mission of pacification and administrative reorganization more than of conquest. Augustus had been in the West from 16 to 13, had organized the provinces, founded colonies, and ended the last Cantabrian resistance. When a commander returned to Rome after a mission like that, he was entitled to a public honor, and the Senate offered him two: an altar to Peace and an altar to Fortuna Redux, the Fortune that brings you home. Augustus accepted the first and, true to his style, avoided the honors that put him too much in the spotlight as a person.

There is a precise political choice in this. A triumph is celebrated in one day and then forgotten. An altar stays where it is, and every year, on the set date, someone comes back to make a sacrifice there. Augustus always preferred honors that were repeated over time to those that burned out in a single morning. The Ara Pacis is the best-designed propaganda machine of antiquity precisely because it does not celebrate a victory: it celebrates the end of victories.

Why the Dedication Took Place on January 30

Three and a half years passed between the decree and the consecration, the time needed to physically carve such a quantity of marble. The solemn dedicatio fell on January 30, 9 BC, and the date was not chosen at random, strictly speaking: January 30 was the birthday of Livia Drusilla, Augustus's wife. On this point the scholarly tradition agrees, and the Fasti Praenestini calendar records the occasion. Ovid dedicates a passage of the Fasti to the altar, in the first book, invoking Peace and asking her to stay among the Romans. It is the most beautiful literary testimony we have about the monument, and it has the advantage of being almost contemporary.

In our view, Livia's birthday is the detail that makes the Ara Pacis a modern monument. You don't consecrate a state altar on your wife's birthday out of marital affection. You do it because you are building the idea that the peace of the empire coincides with the stability of a family, and that this family is your own. The whole processional frieze, as we'll see, does nothing but reinforce this.

Where the Ara Pacis Really Stood

The monument you see today on the Tiber is not in the place where it was originally built. The original Ara Pacis stood in the northern Campus Martius, along the urban stretch of the via Flaminia, which inside the walls was called via Lata and is today via del Corso. The exact spot is under Palazzo Fiano Peretti Almagià, at the height of via in Lucina, a few hundred meters southeast of its current location. Anyone who walks along the Corso and stops in front of that palazzo is standing on top of the altar's foundations, and almost nobody knows it.

The Mile from the Pomerium and the Meaning of the Site

The choice of site has a legal logic that is worth explaining in full, because it's the kind of thing that turns a visit into a lesson. The northern Campus Martius was the area dedicated to celebrating victories, and it lay one Roman mile, a little less than a kilometer and a half, from the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city. The pomerium was not a wall but a ritual line, and crossing it had immediate legal consequences: a commander returning from a campaign lost the imperium militiae, the military power, and regained the imperium domi, the civil power. A general waiting for his triumph had to stay outside the pomerium until the day of the ceremony, because crossing it would have cost him his command.

Placing the Altar of Peace exactly there meant positioning it on the threshold between war and the city. The monument was oriented so that it had one entrance toward the via Flaminia and one toward the Campus Martius. Anyone arriving from the north, that is from the frontier, met it as the first significant building before entering Rome. A manifesto planted at the front door of the house. The orientation you see today in the pavilion does not reproduce the ancient one, and this is one of the reasons why, when you go in, it's better to think in terms of the entrance side and the back side rather than cardinal points.

The Ara Pacis, the Horologium Augusti and the Mausoleum of Augustus

The altar did not stand alone. In the northern Campus Martius, Augustus had built, or was building, three enormous and connected things: his own Mausoleum, begun in 28 BC, the Ara Pacis, and a gigantic astronomical instrument that the sources call the Horologium Augusti or Solarium Augusti. The gnomon of that instrument was an Egyptian obelisk of red granite, brought from Heliopolis in 10 BC and attributed to the pharaoh Psammetichus II. Today it is the obelisk you see in Piazza di Montecitorio. Pliny the Elder, in the Naturalis Historia, describes the setup and says that the obelisk's shadow fell on a pavement with bronze markings, and that over time the instrument stopped being accurate.

In the 1970s the German archaeologist Edmund Buchner proposed a fascinating reading: the tip of the shadow, on Augustus's birthday, September 23, would have pointed exactly at the center of the Ara Pacis, joining time, the sun and the prince in a single symbolic device. The hypothesis was enormously successful. It ended up in every textbook, and guidebooks still repeat it as if it were established fact. It isn't. Since the 1990s, several scholars have redone the calculations and re-examined the excavations, and Buchner's reconstruction is now seriously disputed: the elevation of the ancient ground level, the actual length of the meridian and the position of the altar don't add up as they should. The cautious version, and the one I recommend adopting, is that the obelisk was a monumental sundial and that the Mausoleum-Horologium-Ara Pacis complex was conceived as a unified propaganda ensemble. The precise astronomical alignment, however, remains a modern hypothesis under discussion.

That the three monuments were in dialogue, in any case, is beyond question. The Mausoleum says where the prince comes from and where he will end up. The Horologium says that Rome's time is his time. The Ara Pacis says what he brought. Anyone visiting the museum today and then looking out from the terrace onto the Mausoleum has in front of them two-thirds of that project, pieced back together by chance by a city plan from the 1930s.

How to Read the Ara Pacis Slab by Slab

The enclosure should be read like a book with two superimposed registers. At the bottom, for about half its height, runs a band of acanthus scrolls: nature. At the top, above a Greek key band, runs the figured band: history and myth. The two bands break off where they meet the pilasters and resume on the next side, so the eye goes around the monument without ever finding a true stopping point. The four Corinthian corner pilasters and the four flanking the doors are decorated on the outside with candelabra motifs and left plain on the inside. They supported an architrave that today we see entirely remade. None of the original survived, and the reconstruction relied on two Roman coins, one from the Neronian period and one from the Domitianic period, which depict the altar seen from two opposite sides.

The Outer Enclosure and the Inner Enclosure of the Ara Pacis

The thing most visitors overlook is that the inside of the enclosure is also carved, and that its decoration is conceptually the most refined of the whole monument. Inside, in the lower band, the marble imitates a real wooden fence, with vertical boards and posts. Above, hung from ox skulls, the bucrania, hang garlands of fruit, leaves and ears of grain, with paterae, the bowls for libations, in the open spaces. It is the reproduction in eternal marble of a temporary structure: the enclosure of boards and the garlands that were actually set up around a sacred area on the day of the sacrifice. The message is that the event has been made permanent.

Look at the garlands slowly, because they are one of the most beautiful botanical catalogs in ancient art: pomegranates, pine cones, bunches of grapes, ears of grain, figs, apples, bay and oak leaves. Fruits from different seasons appear together on the same garland, and this is not a sculptor's oversight. It is the image of a land that produces everything all year round, that is, of the Golden Age returned. The same idea that the outer frieze entrusts to the acanthus scrolls is here entrusted to fruit.

The Ramp, the Altar Proper and the Sacrifice Frieze

At the entrance, a ramp of nine steps leads inside the enclosure. Climbing it, you reach a second staircase and finally the altar, which has the form of a table with two side wings rolled into volutes. The altar too has its own frieze, much smaller and much less well known, and it is the most genuinely Roman piece in the whole complex. It depicts the annual sacrifice prescribed by the decree of the Senate, with the Vestals, the priests, the vittimari and the animals led to the slaughter. The style is different from that of the great friezes: drier, more chronicle-like, less Greek. It is proof that different hands and traditions were at work on the site.

The practical advice is not to stop at the outer circuit. A great many visitors walk the perimeter, photograph the Tellus and leave without ever going inside the enclosure. It is there that the monument stops being a manifesto and becomes again what it was: a place where animals were slaughtered to give thanks to a deity.

The Mythological Panels of the Ara Pacis

On the two short sides, flanking the doors, there are four large figured panels: two per side. These are the most famous slabs, the ones scholarly literature has spent the most ink on. The entrance side, the one reached from the ramp, bears the Lupercal and the sacrifice of Aeneas to the Penates. The opposite side bears the personification of Rome seated on weapons and the large panel of the Tellus. Taken together they tell a single story: the origins of Rome on the left, the completion of the empire on the right. Myth and allegory, past and future, facing one another.

The Lupercal

Only very few fragments remain of the Lupercal panel, but enough to reconstruct the scene of the founding of Rome. Mars, armed, father of the twins and protecting deity of the City, can be recognized, along with the shepherd Faustulus. The two watch, at the Ficus ruminalis, the suckling of Romulus and Remus by the she-wolf, against a background of marsh plants that allude to the bank of the Tiber where the basket had run aground. The head of Mars was recovered as early as the 19th century and is one of the few ancient pieces of this slab.

It's worth explaining why the Lupercal sits right here. Augustus was obsessed with the parallel with Romulus. In 27 BC it was debated whether to give him the name Romulus instead of Augustus, and the idea was dropped because it was too loaded with monarchic suspicions. Putting the she-wolf on the side of the altar meant saying that the second founding of Rome, the Augustan one, was as legitimate as the first. Besides, the same princeps had the Lupercal restored on the Palatine.

The sacrifice of Aeneas to the Penates

On the right of the entrance door is the panel of the sacrifice of Aeneas to the Penates, and here the ancient marble is much more abundant. A mature man, his head veiled according to Roman rite and a cloak leaving part of his athletic torso bare, sacrifices at a rustic altar. He holds the sceptrum. He is traditionally identified as Aeneas, son of Venus and ancestor of the gens Iulia, although a minority of scholars have proposed Numa Pompilius, the priest-king. Behind him stands a younger figure, of whom the right hand resting on a spear and part of the robes in Eastern style remain, and who is read as Ascanius or, by others, as Achates.

Two young camilli, the ministers of the cult, attend the rite. The altar is draped with festoons, and on it are sacrificed the first fruits and the white sow of Laurentum, the animal that, according to the myth, showed Aeneas the place to found the city. At the top left, looking out from a small temple built into the rock, appear the Penates of Lavinium, the protective gods Aeneas had brought from Troy. The overall reading is clear: the founder of the lineage performs the gesture that the princeps will perform on this same altar. There is also someone who has proposed recognizing in that face the features of Augustus himself, considered a descendant of Venus. It is a recurring suggestion in the literature, but it remains an interpretive proposal, not a fact.

Rome seated on the weapons

On the other short side, to the left of the back door, the personification of Rome was meant to be. This is the panel in the worst condition of all: only very scant fragments remain, which allow us to recognize on the right a female figure in Amazonian dress, with one shoulder bare, seated on a heap of weapons. The current reconstruction imagines her flanked by other figures, perhaps Honor and Virtue, but this is a proposal for study.

The motif of the goddess seated on the pile of enemy weapons is anything but decorative. It means the weapons have been laid down and that one can now sit on them. It is the image of war put away. The fact that this is exactly the panel that is almost entirely lost is one of those ironies that the history of monuments often has in store, and one worth telling standing in front of the empty space.

The Tellus, or Pax, or Italy

This is the most beautiful panel and the best preserved, reaching us practically intact, and it is also the one whose subject we do not know for certain. A large matronly figure sits at the center with two putti in her lap and some first fruits. On either side are two half-naked nymphs, one seated on a swan in flight, symbol of air, the other on a sea monster, symbol of the sea. The two animals evoke the formula terra marique, peace on land and at sea, which recurs in official Augustan documents. The landscape is in three parts: on the left, riverine, with reeds and an overturned oinochoe from which water flows, in the center, rocky, with flowers and animals, a heifer lying down and a sheep grazing, on the right, marine.

Who the central figure is has been debated for a century and a half. Tellus, the Mother Earth, has been proposed. Venus Genetrix, ancestor of the gens Iulia, has been proposed. So have the personification of Italy and Pax herself. The most convincing explanation, and the one that has prevailed in recent studies, is that the ambiguity was intended. Augustan ideology worked through overlaps, and a figure that is at once Earth, Italy and Peace says more things at the same time than a single figure would. Then, if Venus is there, the panel makes a perfect pair with the Rome on the other side: Venus and Rome, the two cults that Hadrian would unite in a single temple in the second century.

Facing this panel, look at the heifer. She is slumped down, not dead, and she's chewing her cud. In a monument that talks about empires and dynasties, the detail worth the price of admission is a cow resting.

The Procession Frieze of the Ara Pacis

Along the two long sides runs the procession frieze, the centerpiece of the monument and the reason the Ara Pacis is compared with the Parthenon. The procession is the one for the altar's vow, and it divides into two parts: an official one, with priests and magistrates, and a semi-official one, with Augustus's family. The frieze should be read as a whole, in four sections: half of the official procession and half of the family procession for each side. The two official scenes follow one after the other. The two family scenes, on the other hand, should be thought of as placed side by side, not consecutive.

The Side with Augustus and the Priests

The best-preserved part of the frieze opens with the lictors, the officials who precede the magistrate, and continues with the figure of the prince, unfortunately mutilated, recognizable by his position at the head of the procession and by his veiled head. They are followed by the four greater flamens, identifiable with absolute certainty by the apex, the leather cap with a wooden tip fixed on top, an object so distinctive that it makes that group the reference point for orienting yourself across the entire frieze. Behind them, an attendant carries the sacrificial axe.

Anyone who wants to understand how a Roman religious procession worked must look here and nowhere else. The priests are not marching. They're chatting, turning around, one rests a hand on another's shoulder, a child tugs at an adult's cloak. The sculptor captured the murmur of a real procession, which almost never happens in the Parthenon frieze of the Panathenaea, the declared model. It's the difference between a Greek ideal and a Roman chronicle dressed up as a Greek ideal.

Agrippa, Livia, Tiberius

Right after the priestly group, the dynastic section begins, and it's the one you look at with your nose two centimeters from the glass. The male figure with a veiled head, in profile, with a lined face and the air of someone in command, is identified by consensus as Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the general who won at Actium, Augustus's son-in-law and for years the second man in the empire. At his feet, a child clings to his cloak. Behind Agrippa, the woman with the veil and the restrained expression is Livia. Beside her, the man who turns around is Tiberius, Livia's son from her first marriage and future emperor.

The identifications do not all carry the same degree of certainty, and anyone who tells you about them as if they were carved in stone is oversimplifying things for you. The Agrippa, Livia, Tiberius group, however, is by now generally accepted by scholars, and comparisons with official portraiture hold up. Look at Agrippa. He is the only one in the frieze who truly has the air of a military man in the middle of a crowd of civilians.

Antonia, Drusus and the Children of the Frieze

A little further on is the group that always turns heads: a young woman, Antonia the Younger, daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia, turns toward her husband, Drusus the Elder, Tiberius's brother, who wears the military cloak, the paludamentum. Between them, held by the hand, a small child looks up at the adults. He is traditionally identified as Germanicus, the couple's son, destined to become the most beloved man in Rome and to die in the East at 34.

The presence of children is the real historical novelty of this frieze. Before the Ara Pacis, Roman public art did not put children in official processions. Here there are at least five or six of them, of different ages, some bored, one clinging, one with a finger in his mouth. It's pure politics. In 18 BC Augustus had passed the legislation on marriage and childbirth, and showing his family full of heirs meant setting the example the law asked of citizens. One of the children wears clothing of non-Roman style and has a torc around his neck. Some read him as a foreign prince visiting Rome, and others as Gaius or Lucius Caesar dressed in the Trojan manner, a reference to the family's Aeneadic origins. Here too: proposals, not certainties.

Why the Ara Pacis Procession Is Not a Real Procession

This is the point that separates the tourist visit from the visit of someone well informed. The scene cannot depict a ceremony that really took place, and the proof is chronological. If it were the procession of 13 BC, Augustus could not have his head veiled as pontifex maximus, because he became one only in 12 BC. If it were the one of nine BC, Agrippa could not be there, because he had died in 12 BC. Tiberius and Drusus were busy with campaigns in Illyricum and in Germany.

The frieze is therefore an ideal political photograph, a group portrait that shows the dynasty as Augustus wanted it seen, not as it was on any particular day. It should be read alongside the fierce uncertainties of those years over the succession, which would erupt in 6 BC with Tiberius's voluntary withdrawal to Rhodes. The marble says everything is in order precisely when nothing is. It's the mechanism of every family portrait above the fireplace, applied to an empire.

The plant frieze of the Ara Pacis and the propaganda of the Golden Age

If I had to point out just one thing to look at with a magnifying glass, it would be the lower band. The acanthus scrolls take up half the height of the enclosure and are, technically, the hardest part to carve and the easiest to ignore. From a single clump placed at the center of each panel, two symmetrical tendrils start out and curl into smaller and smaller spirals, until they fill the entire surface without leaving one centimeter of background. The scrolls are never identical: the terminal flowers change, the direction of the leaves changes, the grafts change.

The animals hidden in the scrolls of the Ara Pacis

A small bestiary lives inside that tangle of plants, and finding it is the game I always suggest to younger visitors. There are lizards, snakes, frogs, scorpions, insects, birds on nests with eggs, butterflies. High up, on the larger scrolls, swans appear with their wings spread. The swan is the animal of Apollo, the god Augustus had chosen as his personal protector after Actium and to whom he had dedicated the temple on the Palatine. It is not a neutral ornament: it is a signature.

The refinement of the workmanship recalls Alexandrian art and confirms that Greek workshops, probably called in for the purpose, worked on the site. But the meaning is entirely Roman. Nature, in those years, was the great theme of Augustan poetry: Virgil in the Georgics and in the Fourth Eclogue, Horace in the Carmen saeculare, sing of a land that bears fruit again because the war is over. The plant frieze is that poetry translated into marble. A vegetation that grows orderly, lush, immortal, populated by harmless little creatures: the Golden Age not as a lost memory but as a program of government.

The meander band and the logic of the two registers

Between the plant register and the figurative one runs a meander band, the continuous Greek key. It seems to be a connecting element and instead it is the key to the composition. It separates the world of nature from that of men and, with its geometric rhythm, prevents the two from merging. Below is what grows, above is what decides. The implicit message is that the first depends on the second.

The original colors of the Ara Pacis and the virtual reconstructions

The white marble we see is a modern convention, not an ancient state. Like all Greek and Roman sculpture, the Ara Pacis was painted: blues, reds, greens, ochre, gilding on the details. Non-invasive analyses carried out on the surfaces have identified traces and residues of pigments, and the color reconstructions began from there. In 2009 the first tests were made with digital projectors to restore the polychromy onto the original without touching it, and from that experiment came the line of work the museum still carries on today.

We have to be honest about one point: the polychromy proposed is a reasoned reconstruction, not a photograph. Where the pigments have survived, the choice is documented. Where they have not survived, one proceeds by analogy with other monuments and by likelihood. Those who watch the projection should know this, because color has a very strong emotional effect and risks making what is a proposal seem certain. That said, the experience is instructive. With color the frieze can be read, the planes separate, the figures stand out from a distance. White, which seems noble to us, would have looked to the ancients like unfinished work.

L'Ara si rivela: the videomapping on the Ara Pacis

The multimedia project currently on the schedule is called L'Ara si rivela and runs from March 27 to December 31, 2026. It is a videomapping: the images are projected directly onto the monument, which becomes the screen of itself, and they restore the original polychromy together with the reconstruction of the ancient context. It lasts about 40 minutes, is followed through headphones and is available in Italian, English, French and Spanish.

Shows are held on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays in the evening, with time slots that change over the season: from March 27 to April 5 at 20:00, 21:00 and 22:00, from April 10 to May 31 and then from June 5 to September 13 at 21:00, 22:00 and 23:00, from September 18 to 27 at 20:00, 21:00, 22:00 and 23:00. Tickets cost €15,00 full price and €13,00 reduced. There is a family rate of €22,00 for two adults with children under 18 and €11,00 for one adult with children, while school groups pay €4,00 per student. The schedule can change during the season, so check arapacis.it before making plans. The dedicated page is L'Ara si rivela.

A clear opinion, from someone who has seen several projections on ancient monuments: this is one of the few that are worth the extra cost, and the reason is that the monument is inside a glass case, so the darkness is controlled and the projection doesn't have to compete with public lighting. If you have to choose between the daytime and evening visit, and you already have a minimal idea of what the panels depict, go in the evening. If instead it's your first time and you can't tell Aeneas from Tellus, do the regular visit first: the projection explains little and shows a lot.

The history of the finds of the Ara Pacis, from the sixteenth century to today

The story of the recovery of the Ara Pacis spans four centuries and is, for an archaeologist, more instructive than the monument itself. It sums up everything that happened to Roman antiquities in the modern age: the plundering, the collecting, the international dispersal, nationalism, technique.

The Middle Ages and the marble quarry

In the Middle Ages the altar met the fate of almost all the ancient monuments of Rome: it became a quarry. A marble worker extracted its blocks to reuse them or to reduce them to lime, which is the worst fate, because burned marble doesn't come back. Meanwhile the ground level of the Campus Martius had risen dramatically due to the silt and sand deposited by the Tiber's floods: already in the second century AD the monument was suffering from damp, many parts had come loose from the main body, and a brick wall had had to be built around it to contain the fill. At that point only the figured friezes stuck out of the ground. When the Middle Ages arrived, only the upper band of the Ara Pacis was visible and nothing more: that was the part that ended up under the chisel of the salvagers.

1568 and the fragments of Palazzo Peretti

The first documented rediscovery took place in 1568, according to other sources already in 1536, during work under Palazzo Peretti in via in Lucina. Some fragments of reliefs belonging to the altar came to light, and nobody understood what they were: they were simply beautiful ancient marbles, prized goods on the Roman market of the sixteenth century. They took different and distant routes. The panel of Tellus entered the Medici collections and ended up in the Uffizi, a part was sold to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, a fragment reached the Louvre Museum, another went to the Vatican Museums, other pieces remained at Villa Medici. Within two centuries the Ara Pacis was scattered between Rome, Florence and Paris without anyone knowing what monument it was.

1859, the Aeneas relief and von Duhn's insight

New excavations in 1859 returned the relief of Aeneas and the head of Mars from the Lupercal panel. Once again the pieces were catalogued without context. Recognition came only in 1879, and not from an Italian: it was the German archaeologist Friedrich von Duhn who understood that those scattered fragments all belonged to the same monument, and that this monument was the Ara Pacis Augustae the ancient sources spoke of. It is one of the great flashes of insight in nineteenth-century archaeological philology, and it should be said that it was based on comparing the reliefs with the description in the Res Gestae and with coins.

The 1903 excavations and the limits of technique

Once the monument was recognized, the problem remained of pulling it out from under an inhabited palace. In 1903 regular excavations were begun, directed by engineer Mariano Cannizzaro and archaeologist Angelo Pasqui. Work officially continued until April 1904 and then informally until February 1905, when everything stopped for lack of funds: the works had already cost about 62,000 lire of the time, an enormous sum for an archaeological site. The technical problem was twofold: it was necessary to dig under the foundations of Palazzo Fiano without making it collapse, and to do so in waterlogged ground a few meters from the Tiber. With the means of 1905 it wasn't possible.

The 1909 urban master plan and the demolitions of the 1930s

In 1909 Rome's new urban master plan provided, among other things, for the demolition of the buildings leaning against the Mausoleum of Augustus, which in the meantime had become an auditorium called the Augusteo. Between 1918 and 1921 Professor Oreste Mattirolo, president of the Piedmontese Society of Archaeology and Fine Arts, proposed gathering the fragments of the Ara scattered across Italy and the world. The idea excited public opinion in the early postwar years, and there was even discussion of which commemorative inscriptions to carve on the reassembled monument, with formulas such as ARA PACIS OLIM AUGUSTAE NUNC TOTIUS ITALIAE or long lists of military victories. Nothing came of it for almost 20 years.

In 1932 demolition began around the Mausoleum, as part of that period of urban clearances that reshaped the center of Rome between the 1920s and 1930s. Many of those demolitions were personally inaugurated by Mussolini, and the newsreels of the Istituto Luce show him with a pickaxe in hand on the rooftops of the houses to be torn down, surrounded by workers. The rearrangement of the Ara Pacis came out of that context and immediately took on an explicit political meaning: the regime intended to tie the recovery of the monument to the celebration of the bimillennial of Augustus's birth, which fell on September 23, 1938.

The 1937 and the freezing of the ground under Palazzo Fiano

In March 1937 the excavations resumed under Palazzo Fiano and continued until December. The technical solution deserves a full account here, because it's the most remarkable episode in the whole history of the monument and almost nobody knows it: to extract the fragments from the foundations without compromising the stability of the building, they resorted to freezing the ground. A refrigerant solution was injected into the subsoil through a series of probes, turning the marshy ground into a solid block and making it possible to dig tunnels under an inhabited five-floor building. It was a cutting-edge technique, borrowed from mining engineering and from work on subways, and applying it to an archaeological site was extraordinary for the time. Anyone who visits the museum thinking of a story of chisels and brushes would do well to remember that the Ara Pacis was pulled out of the ice.

At the same time the assembly work began, extremely difficult because of the scarcity of fragments and the lack of information on the original form: the only figured evidence was two Roman coins, one from the age of Nero and one from the age of Domitian, which showed the altar from two opposite sides. On September 23, 1937, at the official opening of the Augustan Bimillennium, Mussolini announced the decision to place the altar in the space cleared by the demolitions between the Mausoleum and the river: a choice of urban stagecraft, not of archaeology.

The 1938 restoration, the royal decree and the casts

In 1938 the excavations ended and they moved on to the reassembly, which took place at the Museo delle Terme. There was very little time: the inauguration had to take place by September 23, the last day of the Bimillennium, and eight or nine months remained. They decided to entrust the restoration to the artist Odoardo Ferretti, a professor of drawing and ornament, who had already worked alongside the archaeologists between 1929 and 1932 on Via dell'Impero works, so that he would make up for the gaps in the documentation with experience and invention. It's a choice that no superintendency would authorize today, and it explains why, in front of the monument, you always have to tell the ancient marble from the integration.

To recover the scattered fragments, in February 1938 King Victor Emmanuel the Third issued a decree giving the Minister of National Education the power to concentrate in Rome the pieces of the Ara located in other cities of the Kingdom and to negotiate their return from foreign states, including through exchanges of state-owned artworks. The Florence fragments and those of the Vatican Museums came back this way. For the pieces in the Louvre and at Villa Medici, which couldn't be recovered, plaster casts were used. The rest was filled in. The altar we see, put differently, is an ancient original inside a modern reconstruction, and the entablature is entirely remade because not a single fragment of it was found during the excavations.

Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo's case and the war

The project for the arrangement of the area was entrusted to the architect Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo, already known for the Museum of the Roman Ships of Nemi. The initial project, from 1935, was never carried out in full: the Governorate's funds were missing and then the war arrived. Instead of marble, travertine and porphyry, they used cement and substitutes. The final result was so far from the design that in the end everyone distanced themselves from it, the author included. The case was inaugurated on September 23, 1938, with a roof and load-bearing structure in red imitation porphyry and a base in white travertine.

The sandbags, the San Lorenzo bombing, the shrapnel walls

On June 10, 1940 Italy entered the war, and a few days later the glazing of the case was dismantled and put in a safe place in a building in the San Lorenzo neighborhood. The altar was surrounded with sandbags and access was closed to the public with wooden barriers two meters high. Between 1941 and 1944 the barriers were removed and replaced by shrapnel walls four and a half meters high at half height, and the monument was reopened. On July 19, 1943 the bombing of San Lorenzo destroyed the glazing that had been put in safety right there: one of the cruelest ironies in the history of Roman conservation.

In 1949 the Higher Council of Antiquities and Fine Arts and the Ministry of Public Education announced a competition of ideas to decide whether to move the Ara Pacis elsewhere or how to renovate the case. In the same year the City reopened the monument to the public, removing the wartime protection and replacing it with perimeter walls four and a half meters high in fake travertine. The following year they were painted white. And the worst damage came to light: the sandbags had completely destroyed the entablature, the one rebuilt in plaster in 1937 and 1938. The protection had ruined what it was meant to save.

The projects never carried out between 1950 and 1970

In 1950, the 10 projects submitted to the competition were exhibited at the Casa dei Crescenzi. In 1954 three alternative hypotheses were put forward, all serious: moving the altar inside the Mausoleum of Augustus, placing it where the pavilion stands today, transferring it to the double-apse hall of the Baths of Diocletian. The reason was practical: around the monument only three and a half meters remained, too few to take in the friezes at a glance. A commission was tasked with studying the matter together with the Master Plan, and the architect Marcello Piacentini reported its conclusions: move the monument toward the Academy of Fine Arts to gain six meters of breathing room, build a building intended as a museum toward the church of San Rocco, with a garden facing Lungotevere, add a portico. The study of the new project was again entrusted to Morpurgo. Nothing came of it.

In 1968 and 1969 the Rotary Club established the Ara Pacis prize. In 1969 the City proposed putting the glass walls back in place of the walls built between 1949 and 1950, and in 1970, with a contribution from the Rotary Club of Rome, the work was actually carried out according to the Morpurgo project: down came the splinter-proof walls, up went the glass walls. The pavilion went back to being the 1938 one, and in that form it lasted until the end of the century, increasingly inadequate from a climate and conservation standpoint. In 1995 the municipal superintendent Eugenio La Rocca set a fixed point meant to close any discussion: moving the Ara Pacis without causing it serious damage was impossible. From that moment the question was no longer where to put it, but what to build around it.

The Ara Pacis Museum by Richard Meier

In 1997, under the Rutelli administration, the redevelopment project for the area, signed by the American architect Richard Meier, was presented. The commission was awarded in 1998 by direct assignment, with no tender or competition, and this procedural detail weighed on the controversy as much as and more than the formal choices. The project became executive in 2000, the demolition and construction work went on for six years, and the museum was inaugurated on April 21, 2006, Rome's birthday, with Walter Veltroni as mayor. The architectural project is by Richard Meier and Partners Architects. The site organization was entrusted to Maire Engineering.

How the Ara Pacis Museum is built

The building extends lengthwise, from north to south, in reinforced concrete, and is divided into three sectors with different characters. The north sector, toward Ponte Cavour, is opaque, plastered white, and contains the atrium with ticket office and bookshop. In it is a massive wall of quarry-split travertine blocks, material taken from the same quarries that had supplied the stone for Piazza Augusto Imperatore in the 1930s. The central sector is the transparent pavilion that houses the altar, with large metal surfaces and tempered glass panes: over 1,500 square meters of glass, in panes up to three meters by five, a double layer of 12 millimeters with an argon-filled cavity. The south sector, opaque again, houses offices, services and a conference room on two levels, with a refreshment area and a public terrace overlooking the Mausoleum.

The semi-basement floor holds the library, the management offices and two artificially lit rooms for displaying the fragments, with independent entrances. Climate control is handled by radiant panels and an air curtain that prevents condensation on the glass: that is the technical reason why the monument, today, no longer crumbles to powder. And one element survives from the previous arrangement: the east wall of the base, with the transcription of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti made from the critical edition by Enrica Malcovati. Anyone who reads it from the outside, on the wall, is reading the political will of Augustus in the spot where his adoptive son Tiberius wanted it.

The controversy over the Ara Pacis Museum

It has to be told in full and without partisanship, because it is a case study on contemporary architecture in historic centers. The criticisms of the Meier project were of four kinds. Formal: a white, horizontal volume in an international language, dropped between buildings of the 1930s and Baroque churches. Urban planning: the wall that separated the museum from Lungotevere was accused of closing off the square and hiding the river. Procedural: direct assignment without a competition, in a country where architecture competitions are the exception. Political: the operation was the work of the center-left administration and became a target of the opposing campaign.

At the 2006 inauguration, a group of sympathizers of the Fiamma Tricolore protested, complaining that 16 million euros had been spent, with another 24 allocated, to build, in their words, an outrage and to please yet another foreign architect. In January 2008, Mayor Gianni Alemanno, backed by critic Vittorio Sgarbi, declared that he wanted to tear down the museum, calling it a disgrace to the city, and to move it to the outskirts, subject to a citywide referendum. In June he scaled back the proposal. Relocating it was not sustainable for the city's finances nor compatible with the context, and an adjustment would be carried out instead, in particular reducing the wall facing the road, estimated at the time at 500,000 euros. In 2012 a project was announced to demolish part of that wall, with an estimate of 1,400,000 euros.

The defenses were just as serious. The pavilion solves a real conservation problem: the 1938 display case had become a greenhouse that was condemning the marble. It allows close-up reading of the friezes, which was impossible in the previous arrangement for lack of space. It brings filtered natural light onto the monument, which is the condition that makes the reliefs readable. And it gives the city an auditorium and an exhibition space that the Historic Center lacked. My verdict: the interior works, the exterior doesn't. Inside, the balance between light and marble is calibrated very well, and the architecture disappears, which is the highest compliment for a museum container. Outside, the front on the lungotevere remains a wall that turns its back on the river, and in a city where the Tiber is already quite forgotten, this was not the right gesture.

The underpass that was never built

The underpass deserves a chapter of its own, because it tells the story of Rome better than any analysis. In 2004 it was first proposed to bury the stretch of lungotevere that separates the Ara Pacis from the river, replacing it with a park. Work was supposed to start in 2007. In May 2005 the Gruppo Calosi e Del Mastio submitted an underpass project running from Ponte Cavour to Ponte Matteotti, with two exits and with the demolition of the travertine wall facing the Tiber. In 2010 the Alemanno administration approved the project, with a start planned for spring 2011. On February 14, 2011, the tender was published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale, with work to start in 2013 and a duration of 24 months. The project also provided for protecting the centuries-old plane trees along the lungotevere with a root conservation technique already used on the trees of the Champs-Élysées. In May 2012, 18 associations from the Historic Center formally warned the mayor for not having canceled the project. On May 24 of the same year, the Capitoline Administration announced that the tender had not been awarded due to inadequate bids, and shortly after, Alemanno declared that he had completely shelved the idea. Eight years of projects, tenders, warnings and press releases. The lungotevere is still there.

Exhibitions at the Ara Pacis Museum

The exhibition space at via di Ripetta 180 is one of the most active venues in the city's network, and over the years it has hosted major photography and archaeological exhibitions. In 2026 the main lineup is dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe with the exhibition Le forme della bellezza, open from May 29 to October 4, 2026. A ticket for the exhibition alone costs 15,00 euro full price and 13,00 reduced. The combined ticket with the museum costs 23,00 euro full price and 17,00 reduced. Anyone who wants to see both should do the math: the combined ticket is worth it, but only if you have at least two and a half hours to spare.

The museum also runs a program of touch tours, Esplorazioni tattili all'Ara Pacis, part of the Musei da toccare project and active throughout 2026. It is designed for visitors with visual impairments but works very well for children too, and it has the rare merit of letting you understand through touch the difference between one relief level and another. For booking, ask at 060608.

How to visit the Ara Pacis Museum

The route is short and dense, and that is its main quality in a city where almost all museums ask for half a day. You enter from the north sector, get your ticket, go down the staircase that bridges the difference in level between via di Ripetta and the lungotevere, and come out into the pavilion, with the altar in front of you and light falling from the skylights. You walk all the way around the monument, go up the ramp, come back down, and return to the side with the panels.

How long the visit to the Ara Pacis takes

With a careful reading of the panels and the frieze, you'll spend 40 to 60 minutes inside. A quick visit takes just 20 minutes. If you add the temporary exhibition, you easily reach two and a half hours. My practical advice: plan on 45 minutes and use all of it, because the temptation to do the round in 10 minutes is strong and the monument doesn't forgive rushing. Opera glasses, or even just your phone's zoom, change the visit: the details of the vegetal frieze and the faces of the procession are two or three meters up, and to the naked eye they get lost.

The recommended route inside the Ara Pacis Museum

It's best to do it in this order. First, a wide loop without stopping, to take the measure of the enclosure. Second, a pass over the four mythological panels, starting with the Tellus, which is the best preserved and teaches you how to read the others. Third, a pass along the long frieze, looking first for the four flamens with the apex, which are your point of orientation, and then working back up toward the dynastic group. Fourth: inside the enclosure, for the festoons and the altar frieze. Fifth: the vegetal frieze, taking your time and hunting for lizards and swans. Sixth: the fragment rooms on the lower floor, which almost nobody looks at, and which explain what it means to reassemble a monument better than any educational panel.

Ara Pacis tickets and how to save

Anyone who lives in Rome or the Metropolitan City enters for free with an identity card. It's the most important change for Roman visitors, and it's worth repeating, because many people keep paying out of habit. The MIC card also gives free entry to the civic museums. Conditions for issuing it and its cost are on the official website. The reduced ticket of €8.50 is available to citizens of the European Union aged 6 to 25 and to those over 65, to teachers on active duty, to journalists with a press card, to holders of the Roma Pass and Metrebus Card, and to certain categories of partner employees. Entry is free for children under six, for people with disabilities with their companion, for European Union tour guides and tourist interpreters, and for members of ICOM and ICOMOS. School groups enter for free with school documentation and a reservation at 060608.

The Ara Pacis with children

It's one of the Roman museums that works best with children, and the reason is obvious: it's small, it's all in one glance, and it has a frieze full of animals. No endless corridors, no rooms full of vases, no lines. A seven-year-old can handle 40 minutes in here very well, and there are two games that always work. The first is hunting for animals in the vegetal frieze: you count lizards, snakes, frogs, nests with eggs, swans. The second is hunting for children in the procession frieze: there are several, of different ages, and spotting them means looking at the adults' faces to work out who is holding whose hand.

The story to tell them, if they're past 10, isn't the one about the emperor but the one about the ice: in 1937, to pull the pieces out from under a five-story building, the ground was frozen. It always works. Strollers get in without any problem, there are restrooms on the lower floor near the elevator, and the terrace overlooking the Mausoleum is a good spot for a break. If you have more than an hour, the combo with the evening video mapping can be a lot for the youngest kids: 40 minutes in the dark with headphones isn't for everyone.

Accessibility at the Ara Pacis Museum

On this front, the museum is among the best in the Historic Center. There are three entrances: the museum space on Lungotevere in Augusta, the exhibition space at via di Ripetta 180, and the auditorium at 190. All are about two meters wide and allow wheelchair access. The main entrance and the auditorium entrance are at street level, while the exhibition space has a dedicated ramp. An elevator about one and a half meters wide connects the upper floor to the lower floor, and the restrooms are on the lower floor near the elevator. Inside the museum space, the ramps let you go all the way around the monument, 360 degrees, which means no part of the route is closed off. The auditorium is fully accessible.

At the ticket desk you can ask for a wheelchair to borrow. Hall assistants provide support to visitors who need it. For those arriving by car, there are three reserved parking areas nearby: Lungotevere Prati about 210 meters away, Lungotevere dei Mellini about 270 meters away, and via Marianna Dionigi about 300 meters away. Entry is free for people with disabilities and their companion. For visitors with visual impairments there is the tactile exploration program mentioned above, with reservations at 060608.

When to visit the Ara Pacis

The question I get most often is what time is best. Here's my answer: the last hour and a half before closing, so from 18:00 on, is the best time of the whole day, because the organized groups have finished, the light coming through the skylights is raking, and the marble, which looks flat at noon, suddenly shows its reliefs. My second choice is opening time, at 9:30, which has the advantage of quiet but less interesting light.

As for the seasons: the museum never has lines comparable to those at the big attractions, which makes it a valuable resource on impossible days. On spring long weekends, when Trevi Fountain and piazza di Spagna are impossible to get through, you can get in here within five minutes. Try to avoid days of heavy rain in the early afternoon, when half the Historic Center goes indoors looking for shelter. In the hot months the pavilion is air-conditioned for conservation needs and it's one of the coolest spots in the area: keep that in mind in July. If you're coming for the videomapping, check the calendar because the projections are only on weekends and the times change from month to month.

What to see around the Ara Pacis

The museum is in one of the densest parts of Rome, and within a 10-minute walk you can fill an entire morning without taking any transport.

The Mausoleum of Augustus

It's 70 meters away, on the other side of the square. The Mausoleum of Augustus is the dynastic tomb that the prince had built starting in 28 BC, a huge circular mound that over the centuries served as a Colonna family fortress, a garden, a bullring, a theater, and a concert hall under the name Augusteo, before being isolated by the demolitions of the 1930s. After a very long restoration it has reopened to visitors, and the square around it has been redeveloped. Access rules and booking should be checked on the official channels, because the visiting formula has changed several times. Seeing it after the Ara Pacis, and not before, makes a precise kind of sense: you leave the manifesto and enter the tomb of the same man.

The churches of San Rocco and San Girolamo

On the side facing via di Ripetta, right next to the museum, there are two churches that almost everyone walks past without looking at them. San Rocco all'Augusteo has a 19th-century neoclassical facade that closes off the view of the square. The building was born linked to the hospital of the same name, which played a particular role in Rome's social history because it took in women giving birth in conditions of privacy. Next door, San Girolamo dei Croati, the national church of the Croatian community, has a 19th-century decoration and a 16th-century layout. These are two 5-minute stops that complete the picture of this corner of Campo Marzio.

Piazza del Popolo and Santa Maria del Popolo

Walking back up via di Ripetta, you reach piazza del Popolo in 10 minutes, with the Flaminio obelisk that Augustus himself had brought from Heliopolis in 10 BC, the same year as the obelisk of the Horologium. The connection is worth saying out loud during a visit: two obelisks arrived together, one turned into a sundial, the other set up in the middle of the Circus Maximus and later moved here by Sixtus V. On the square stands Santa Maria del Popolo, which, given its size, is the church with the most masterpieces in the city, including the Cerasi Chapel by Caravaggio and the Chigi Chapel by Raphael. And admission is free.

Via del Corso, Via dei Condotti, Piazza di Spagna

On the other side, heading inland, take via Tomacelli and in 5 minutes you're on via del Corso, which means above the ancient Via Lata, which means above the spot where the Ara Pacis actually stood. Continuing along via dei Condotti you reach piazza di Spagna and the steps of Trinità dei Monti. If you'd rather stay on the Roman theme, head the other way and in a quarter of an hour you'll reach the Pantheon, which is the other great building in Campo Marzio still standing, and then the Museo di Roma a Palazzo Braschi, where you can see how the neighborhood changed between the 18th and 20th centuries.

A curiosity about the Ara Pacis

The curiosity to save for last concerns the way the Ara Pacis was put back together: not with ancient drawings, which don't exist, but with two coins. When it came to rebuilding it, very little was known about the monument's original appearance. The literary sources say it existed, not what it looked like. The fragments were scattered across half of Europe, with no verified connections between them. The only images available were two Roman coin dies, one from the Neronian age and one from the Domitianic age, showing the altar seen from two opposite sides: just a few millimeters of metal with a schematic building on top.

From those two coins, the presence and shape of the architrave, the arrangement of the doors, and the existence of the lateral acroteria that were meant to crown the monument and are no longer there were deduced. These are reasonable deductions, and in most cases confirmed by construction logic, but they remain deductions. That's why, standing in front of the altar, I always stress one point: you are looking at an ancient original inside a modern shell, and the entablature above your head is entirely a reconstruction, since not a single fragment of it turned up during the excavations.

There is a second, little-known aspect of the same story. When, in 1938, the pieces that had ended up abroad were due to return to Rome, some never came back at all. Those in the Louvre and those at Villa Medici stayed where they were, and plaster casts were installed in their place. This means that, walking around the enclosure, at certain points you are looking at a copy of a fragment that is in Paris. Whoever knows what to look for can check the surface differences between marble and aged plaster. They show up if you look in raking light. It's the kind of detail that turns a monument into a document.

Something nobody tells you about Ara Pacis

That the inside of the enclosure is more interesting than the outside, and that almost no one goes up there. 95 percent of visitors walk the outer loop, photograph the Tellus, look at the procession, and leave. The nine steps of the ramp are climbed by very few people, and those who do often stay there for 10 seconds. Yet inside is the conceptually most refined part of the monument: the marble that imitates a fence of wooden boards, the bucrania from which hang the garlands of fruit, the paterae for libations, and above all the small frieze of the altar itself, the one with the Vestals and the victimarii, which is the only genuinely Roman piece in style in the entire complex.

The second thing nobody will tell you is more mundane and concerns logistics. The museum has three separate entrances, and on days with heavy crowds it helps to know which one to use: the museum space on the Lungotevere in Augusta for the monument, Via di Ripetta 180 for the temporary exhibitions, and Via di Ripetta 190 for the auditorium. Anyone who comes for the exhibition and queues on the Lungotevere wastes time, and vice versa. During big exhibition periods the line forms on Via di Ripetta, and anyone who wants to see only the altar skips ahead of everyone from the river entrance.

Third thing, and it counts as a method tip: the lower level, with the artificially lit rooms devoted to fragments, is a part of the museum that a great many people don't even see. You get there by elevator or by stairs, and it helps you understand what reconstruction means: pieces not repositioned, comparisons, study materials. If you have 20 extra minutes, spend them there and not in front of the bookshop.

The advice I give you for visiting Ara Pacis

There is only one piece of advice, and it is worth more than all the others combined: before going in, decide what you want to look at. Ara Pacis is a monument that is used up in 20 minutes if you approach it like a photograph, and that keeps you busy for two hours if you approach it like a text. It isn't big, it isn't physically demanding, and it has no set routes: the whole weight of the visit is up to you.

The method I recommend is the four-step one. First step: walk a wide loop, in silence, without stopping, to take in the proportions of the enclosure. Second step: the four mythological panels, starting with the Tellus because it is the most legible and teaches the grammar of the other three. Third step: the long frieze, first looking for the four flamens with the apex on their heads, which are the buoy you orient yourself around, and from there working back up to the dynastic group with Agrippa, Livia, and Tiberius. Fourth step: inside the enclosure, on the ramp, for the garlands and the altar frieze.

I'll add three practical tips that come from experience. Bring a zoom, even just the one on your phone: the best details are three meters up and are lost to the naked eye. Come in the last hour and a half of opening, because the raking light from the skylights brings out the reliefs that vanish at noon. And if you have to choose between the daytime visit and the evening video mapping, the answer depends on you: the first time you come during the day and learn to read the slabs, and the second time you come back in the evening and look at the color. Doing the opposite means watching a nice projection without understanding what it's projected onto.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely mentioned

That the monument is not where it used to be, and that its current location is the result of a political decision made in 1937 based on urban planning direction, not archaeology. Many people know it, but very few draw the consequences. The original Ara Pacis stood a few hundred meters from here, under Palazzo Fiano Peretti Almagià, at the height of Via in Lucina, on the edge of the urban Via Flaminia, that is, today's Via del Corso. It stood there for a specific reason: it was the point where, a mile from the sacred boundary of the city, the commander returning from war stopped being a general and became a citizen again.

Moving it to the Tiber lost that meaning and gained another one, built at the drawing table: the direct pairing with the Mausoleum. In the ancient Campus Martius the two monuments were close but did not face each other. Today they look at each other across a piazza. It is a relationship invented in the 20th century, not in the first century BC, and a visitor would do well to know this, because the reading of the complex depends on it. It should also be said that the current orientation does not reproduce the ancient one, which is why, in front of the panels, it is more honest to reason in terms of entrance side and back side than cardinal points.

The practical consequence is this: a visit to the Ara Pacis is, inevitably, a double visit. On one side there is an Augustan monument of 9 BC. On the other there is a cultural operation of 1938 and a building of 2006, with all the controversies they have carried with them. Pretending there is only the first is what almost all the audio guides in the world do. The museum, it must be said to its credit, does not: the wall with the Res Gestae, the only surviving element of Morpurgo's arrangement, is there to remind us that this place has two histories.

The Right Photo to Take at the Ara Pacis

The photo everyone takes is the frontal one of the Tellus panel, and it is the least interesting, because the panel is reproduced in every art history textbook in the world and your copy will add nothing. The right photo is another one and takes two moves.

Stand at the corner of the enclosure, not in front of one side, and frame diagonally. This way the frieze of the procession fleeing into the depth, the Corinthian corner pilaster with candelabra motifs and, in the background, the glass walls of the pavilion all enter the same image. You get what a frontal photo never gives: the depth of the relief, that is, the technical reason why this frieze is considered a masterpiece. Take it in the last hour and a half of opening, with the raking light coming down from the skylights, and the planes will separate by themselves.

The second photo, the one nobody takes and which is perhaps the best of all, is a detail of the plant frieze: a single acanthus scroll with a lizard or a nest inside. You need the zoom and a bit of patience, but the result is a photograph that nobody else has, and that explains better than any caption what a Greek stonecutter was capable of doing in Rome 2,000 years ago. A third option, for those who want the context and not the detail: go out onto the terrace of the north sector and photograph the Mausoleum of Augustus with Meier's white in the foreground. It's the image that sums up 80 years of discussion about architecture in the historic center. Photos without flash and without a tripod are allowed. For professional use and for a tripod, ask the staff.

Some Important Events That Happened Here in History

The first event is the consecration of January 30, 9 BC, with the procession of magistrates, priests and Vestals that the senatorial decree of July 4 of AD 13 had established should be repeated every year. For decades, on that day, the most important men of Rome climbed those nine steps and sacrificed. It is the only ancient event that can be dated precisely, and it is the one for which the monument exists.

The second, if it can be called that, is a slow disaster: in the second century AD the altar was already besieged by Tiber silt and surrounded by a brick wall to hold back the buildup of earth. In the Middle Ages it was reduced to a marble quarry for a marble-worker. The third is 1568, when under Palazzo Peretti the first fragments resurfaced that nobody recognized. The fourth is 1879, the year in which Friedrich von Duhn understood that those pieces scattered among Rome, Florence and Paris belonged to the same monument.

The fifth is 1937, with the freezing of the ground under Palazzo Fiano to extract the fragments without making the building collapse: one of the boldest operations of archaeological engineering of the century. The sixth is September 23, 1938, inauguration of the reassembled altar and of Morpurgo's case on the closing day of the Augustan Bimillennium, within a political frame that had very little archaeological about it. The seventh is June 10, 1940, when at the outbreak of the war the glass walls were dismantled and taken to San Lorenzo, where the bombing of July 19, 1943 destroyed them. The altar, protected by sandbags, survived, but those sandbags proved responsible for the destruction of the entablature, as was discovered only in 1949.

The eighth is the ideas competition of 1949 and the long season of projects never carried out, up to the restoration of 1970 financed by the Rotary Club, which put the glass walls back in place of the shrapnel-proof walls. The ninth is April 21, 2006, the day of the Birthday of Rome, when Richard Meier's museum was inaugurated amid applause and protest. The tenth is January 2008, with the announcement of the museum's demolition, later withdrawn: a monument that, in 70 years, has twice risked being taken apart and moved elsewhere.

Who Has Passed Through the Ara Pacis

Let's start with the people who are depicted on the monument, because they passed through here in the literal sense. Augustus, pontifex maximus from 12 BC, with his head veiled at the head of the procession. Livia Drusilla, his wife, on whose birthday the altar was consecrated. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the general of Actium, who died in 12 and is therefore portrayed in a procession that could not have taken place. Tiberius, future emperor. Drusus the Elder with the paludamentum and Antonia the Younger, daughter of Mark Antony, who turns to look at him. The child identified as Germanicus, who would die at 34 in Syria amid suspicions of poison. And the Caesars Gaius and Lucius, the grandsons whom Augustus had adopted and who would both die before their time.

Then there are those who passed through here alive, in the following centuries. The medieval marble-worker who took the blocks apart. The quarrymen of 1568 under Palazzo Peretti, and the merchants who sold the fragments to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Friedrich von Duhn, the German archaeologist who in 1879 gave a name to those pieces. Mariano Cannizzaro and Angelo Pasqui, who in 1903 tried to dig under a palace and were stopped by the counts. Oreste Mattirolo, who from Piedmont proposed reuniting the scattered fragments.

In the 1900s the most cumbersome passage is that of Benito Mussolini, who personally announced on September 23, 1937 the relocation of the altar next to the Mausoleum and made it a piece of the Augustan Bimillennium. And that of Victor Emmanuel III, who in February 1938 signed the decree for the return of the scattered fragments. Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo designed the case, Odoardo Ferretti put it back together with the chisel and with imagination, Marcello Piacentini chaired the postwar commission. Then Eugenio La Rocca, who in 1995 established that moving it was impossible. Francesco Rutelli, who commissioned the project. Richard Meier, who signed it. Walter Veltroni, who inaugurated it in 2006. Gianni Alemanno and Vittorio Sgarbi, who in 2008 proposed tearing it down.

Finally, the artists who have passed through the exhibition space: over the years the museum has hosted major photographic and archaeological exhibitions, from Helmut Newton with the retrospective Legacy between 2023 and 2024 to Robert Mapplethorpe with Le forme della bellezza in 2026. It's a list that says something about the museum: a contemporary container that has learned to live with a 2,000-year-old altar.

Quick Questions About the Ara Pacis

How Much Is the Ticket for the Ara Pacis

The ticket for the museum alone costs €14.00 full price and €8.50 reduced. When a temporary exhibition is on, there is a ticket for the exhibition alone and a combined one, with different rates. In 2026, for the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition, the exhibition alone costs €15.00 full price and €13.00 reduced, the combined ticket €23.00 full price and €17.00 reduced.

Is Entry to the Ara Pacis Free If You Live in Rome

Yes. Since February 2026 admission to the museum has been free for residents of Rome and of the Metropolitan City, who only have to show their ID card at the ticket desk. The same free admission applies to holders of the MIC card.

What Are the Opening Hours of the Ara Pacis Museum

The museum is open every day from 9.30 to 19.30, with last entry one hour before closing. On December 24 and 31 the hours are reduced, with closing at 14.00.

When Is the Ara Pacis Closed

The annual closures are May 1 and December 25. For the rest the museum is open every day, Monday included, which makes it one of the few resources available on the day when many Roman museums rest.

Do You Need to Book to Visit the Ara Pacis

For the individual visitor, booking is not necessary: you buy the ticket at the desk. Buying in advance online or through the 060608 call center carries a presale fee of €1 and is neither refundable nor changeable. For groups of five people or more, booking at 060608 is free, as it is for school groups.

How Long Does a Visit to the Ara Pacis Take

From 40 to 60 minutes with careful reading of the panels and the frieze. A bare 20 minutes if you only do the walk-around. Adding the temporary exhibition brings you comfortably to two and a half hours.

How Do You Get to the Ara Pacis by Public Transport

Metro line A, stops Spagna or Flaminio, and from there about 10 minutes on foot. The surface lines that serve the area are the 70, 81, 87, 119, 280, 492, 628, 990 and C3.

Where Exactly Is the Ara Pacis Museum

On Lungotevere in Augusta, at the corner with Via Tomacelli, 00186 Rome. There are three entrances: the museum space on the lungotevere, the exhibition space at Via di Ripetta 180 and the auditorium at Via di Ripetta 190.

Is the Ara Pacis Wheelchair Accessible

Yes, and it is one of the most accessible museums in the center. The entrances are about two meters wide, the main one and the auditorium one are at street level, the exhibition space has a dedicated ramp. An elevator connects the two floors, the restrooms are on the lower floor near the elevator and the internal ramps let you go around the monument a full 360 degrees. At the ticket office you can ask for a wheelchair.

Is There Disabled Parking Near the Ara Pacis

Yes, three reserved areas nearby: Lungotevere Prati at about 210 meters, Lungotevere dei Mellini at about 270 meters and Via Marianna Dionigi at about 300 meters from the museum.

Can You Take Photographs at the Ara Pacis

Photographs without flash for personal use are allowed and the monument, lit by the skylights, lends itself well. For a tripod and for shots for professional use it's best to ask the room staff before setting up anything.

The Ara Pacis is suitable for children

Very much so. It's small, you can take it all in at a glance, it doesn't have endless routes, and the vegetal frieze is full of animals to look for: lizards, snakes, frogs, nests, swans. The procession frieze also includes several children, and spotting them is a great observation game.

What is the video mapping on the Ara Pacis

It's a projection that uses the monument itself as a screen to bring back its original polychromy and ancient context. The show on the program in 2026 is called L'Ara si rivela. It runs from March 27 to December 31, lasts about 40 minutes, and you follow it on headphones in Italian, English, French, and Spanish.

How much does L'Ara si rivela cost

15 euros for a full ticket and 13 euros for a reduced one. The family rate is 22.00 euros for two adults with children under 18, and 11.00 euros for one adult with children. School groups pay 4.00 euros per student.

What times is the video mapping held

Only on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, in the evening, with time slots that change over the season: from 20 to 22 at the end of March and the beginning of April, from 21 to 23 between April and mid-September, and from 20 to 23 in the second half of September. Check the schedule on the official website before making plans.

Is there an audio guide at the Ara Pacis

Yes. The audio guide costs 4.00 euros and the video guide costs 6.00 euros, and both are available in five languages. There is also a museum app, free for iOS and Android, and groups can rent a kit of radio guides.

Is the Ara Pacis the original or a copy

It's the ancient original, but integrated. A large part of the reliefs is marble from the first century BC. Some parts are additions from the 1938 restoration, the entablature is entirely remade because no fragment of it was found, and the pieces kept at the Louvre and Villa Medici are replaced by plaster casts.

Why the Ara Pacis is not where it originally stood

Because in 1937 it was decided to relocate it to the space cleared by demolitions between the Mausoleum of Augustus and the Tiber. Its original position was a few hundred meters away, under Palazzo Fiano Peretti Almagià, at the height of via in Lucina, along the ancient urban Via Flaminia that today is via del Corso.

Who designed the Ara Pacis Museum

Richard Meier and Partners Architects. The project was assigned in 1998, became executive in 2000, and the building was inaugurated on April 21, 2006. The previous pavilion, from 1938, was by Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo, and the east wall of the base with the Res Gestae survives from it.

Why Meier's museum caused so much debate

For four intertwined reasons: the contemporary architectural language in a historic context, the wall facing the lungotevere, accused of closing off the square on the river, the direct assignment of the commission without a competition, and politics, because the work became a target of the campaign against the city government that had wanted it. In 2008 there was even a proposal to demolish it, which was later dropped.

What is the difference between the Ara Pacis and the Mausoleum of Augustus

They are two different monuments by the same patron, today facing the same square. The Ara Pacis is an altar from 9 BC dedicated to Peace as a deity. The Mausoleum is the dynastic tomb begun in 28 BC, a huge circular tumulus. You visit the first with the museum ticket. The second has its own access rules, which should be checked on the official channels.

What is the Saturnia tellus

It's the traditional name of the best-preserved panel of the Ara Pacis: a seated matronly figure with two putti in her lap, between two nymphs, one on a swan and one on a sea monster. Its identification oscillates between Tellus, Venus Genetrix, Italy, and Pax, and in all likelihood the ambiguity was intended by the patron.

What is the connection between the Ara Pacis and the Montecitorio obelisk

The Montecitorio obelisk was the gnomon of the Horologium Augusti, the great astronomical instrument that Augustus had set up in the Campus Martius with an obelisk brought from Heliopolis in 10 BC. That the two monuments were part of a single project is widely shared. The early twentieth-century hypothesis that the obelisk's shadow pointed to the altar on Augustus's birthday is, however, now highly debated among scholars.

Is there a bookshop and a place to get a drink

The bookshop is in the lobby of the north wing, together with the ticket office. In the south wing, along with the two-level conference hall, there is a refreshment area with a public terrace overlooking the Mausoleum of Augustus, which is also one of the least crowded viewpoints in the center.

How long is the wait in line at the Ara Pacis

Very little, on the vast majority of days. It's not a museum with biblical lines, and in a city like Rome that is a huge advantage. On long weekends and crowded weekends, when the center is impassable, you can get in within five minutes. The exception is during major exhibition periods, when the line forms in front of the entrance at via di Ripetta 180.

Is it worth visiting the Ara Pacis if you have little time in Rome

If you have three days and have never been to Rome, the Colosseum and the Vatican Museums come first. It would be dishonest to say otherwise. If it's your second or third trip, or if you're interested in understanding how Augustus's power worked, this is one of the most efficient places in the city in terms of time spent versus things learned. 40 minutes, and you leave knowing how to read official Roman art.

My final advice is to treat this visit as a short lesson and not as a box to tick off a list. Come late, when the light fades and the groups have left. Go up the ramp and stay inside the enclosure for a few minutes in silence, looking at the marble garlands. Then step out onto the terrace and look at the Mausoleum. 2,000 years ago a man organized this corner of the city to tell you he had brought peace, and the remarkable thing is that it's still working. Knowing how the trick works doesn't make it less beautiful: it makes it much more interesting.

Article written by the editorial team at TourLeaderPro, contact them for Tours and Private/Corporate/V.I.P. Experiences.

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