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

At the Ara Pacis, L’Ara si rivela is on, the videomapping that gives back to Augustus's altar the colors it had 2,000 years ago. It is not an exhibition and it is not a projection on a screen: colored light is shot directly onto the marble reliefs, panel by panel, figure by figure, and the monument stops being the bright white block we all know and goes back to what it really was, a living and extremely colorful object. You enter in the evening, with the museum closed, in small groups, with headphones on. The venue is the Museo dell’Ara Pacis, entrance on Lungotevere in Augusta at the corner with Via Tomacelli, 00186 Rome, inside the white case designed by Richard Meier and inaugurated in 2006. The project is promoted by Roma Capitale and the Capitoline Superintendency of Cultural Heritage, organized and managed by Zètema Progetto Cultura, produced by AV Set Produzioni with Luca Scarzella, with scientific direction by the Capitoline Superintendency.

The available evenings are those indicated by the museum's calendar, which you should check before setting out because the schedule changes season by season and includes special openings on some holidays. The experience lasts around 40 minutes, takes place both around the marble enclosure and inside the monument, and admits a limited number of participants per slot, accompanied by an operator. The narration comes through headphones in Italian, English, French and Spanish. The route can also be done by people with a mobility disability. Buying in advance online is strongly recommended, and you should show up a quarter of an hour before the time of your slot: tickets are neither refundable nor changeable, so arriving late means losing the evening. Prices, reductions and free admissions are published on the museum's official page together with the calendar, and that is where they must be checked.

The thing I want to say right away, because it is the one that matters: the ticket for the evening experience gives access to the multimedia experience only. It is not the museum ticket. If you also want to walk through the rooms, read the panels, look at the portraits of the Julio-Claudian dynasty calmly and in daylight, that is a different admission, at a different time. They are two separate visits and both should be done, ideally in the right order. I come back to this further on, because it is the most useful advice I can give you.

To place the monument within the rest of the city, the general listing for the Ara Pacis remains the starting point, and a short walk away is the Mausoleum of Augustus, which is the other half of this story.

What L’Ara si rivela really is and why videomapping makes sense here

The word videomapping is used for anything, from buildings lit up at Christmas to church facades turned into screens. Here the matter is different and it is worth understanding why. True videomapping consists of measuring an irregular surface in three dimensions and then calibrating the projection so that every pixel of light falls exactly where it must: on the fold of a drapery, on the petal of an acanthus flower, on the cheek of a sculpted child. On a flat facade it is a graphics exercise. On a marble bas-relief a little under four meters high, with figures overlapping on three planes of depth and hundreds of intertwined plant elements, it is a job of millimeter precision. A gap of a few millimeters is enough and the red of the cloak ends up on the bare arm.

The system installed at the museum uses eight 4K laser video projectors, run by a media server that controls the whole show, including the room's ambient lights. This detail, which seems merely technical, is in fact the reason the effect works: if the museum's lights stayed on as in the daytime, the projected color would be washed out and you would see a faded film over the marble. The fact that the same electronic brain switches off, lowers and turns back on the lighting of the case in sync with the narration is what lets the marble look painted and not lit. There is a moment, when the room drops into near-total darkness and then the first panel lights up, in which the room makes an involuntary sound.

The projection is digital and adjustable in real time, which means outlines and colors can be tuned without redoing anything physical. The bas-reliefs light up progressively in correspondence with the group's vantage point, that is, the light accompanies the audience instead of firing everything at once. This is another detail that changes the experience: you are not looking at a single luminous picture from afar, you are moving inside a narration that lights up in front of you and goes out behind your back. Contours of light draw the profiles of the figures and help to read them, and here the service is educational before it is spectacular, because the friezes of the Ara Pacis are extremely crowded and without help the eye cannot tell the second plane from the third.

The narration does not tell only about antiquity. It is perhaps the most intelligent choice of the setup: the route is built in stages, a journey through time that starts from the Augustan origins and arrives at the vicissitudes of the rediscovery. The voices speak of the 16th-century collectors who divided up the fragments, of the restorers who put them back together, of the archaeologists who understood what they had in their hands. It is the part almost nobody expects and that almost everyone, on the way out, cites first.

Where the Museo dell’Ara Pacis is and how to get there

The address is Lungotevere in Augusta, at the corner with Via Tomacelli, in the Campo Marzio district, halfway between Piazza del Popolo and Ponte Cavour. Anyone arriving on foot from the center has two possible routes, and they are two different experiences. The first is Via di Ripetta, which runs down from Piazza del Popolo parallel to the Tiber: you pass in front of the Academy of Fine Arts, you skirt the church of San Rocco, and the case appears on the right, low and wide, with the blind travertine flank toward the river. The second is Via Tomacelli, which comes from Via del Corso and comes out right at the entrance: it is the quickest way if you are coming from the area of the Trevi Fountain or the Pantheon.

The third route, the one I recommend to those who come in the evening and have 10 extra minutes, is Piazza Augusto Imperatore. You enter from Via di Ripetta or from Via dei Pontefici, you find yourself in the large rectangular square built in the 1930s around the mound of the Mausoleum, and from there you look at Meier's case from the long side. In the evening, with the lighting on and the glass becoming transparent from the outside, the altar can be seen from the street. It is one of the few Roman museum buildings that gives something even to those who don't go in.

Public transport and parking

The surface lines that pass closest are those of Via Tomacelli and the Lungotevere, and the historic terminus of the area is the one at Piazza Augusto Imperatore. The nearest metro is the Spagna stop on line A, from which you walk in a little over 10 minutes via Via del Babuino and Piazza del Popolo, or Flaminio, also line A, for those who prefer to come down along Via di Ripetta. Those coming from Trastevere or the Vatican cross Ponte Cavour and find it right in front of them. By car, resign yourself: the area is a limited traffic zone at peak hours and free spots on the Lungotevere are a theoretical hypothesis. In the evening you can find something toward the Muro Torto or at the park-and-ride lots, but the civilized way to get here remains on foot or by public transport.

The history of the altar, from 13 BC to the mud of the Tiber

On July 4 of 13 BC the Senate decided to build an altar to celebrate Augustus's return from three years of pacifying campaigns in Spain and southern Gaul. The solemn consecration came only on January 30 of 9 BC, and the date was not chosen by chance: it was the birthday of Livia, Augustus's wife. Anyone who knows the character knows that nothing, in that family, was left to chance. Augustus's own words, in the Res Gestae, say that the Senate decreed that at the altar magistrates, priests and Vestals would celebrate an annual sacrifice.

The chosen place was in the Campus Martius, in an area consecrated to the celebration of victories, and precisely one Roman mile, 1,472 meters, from the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city. That mile was the point where the consul returning from a military expedition lost his military powers and regained his civil ones. Placing the altar of Peace there meant saying something precise without writing it: war ends here, on this side peace begins. The altar had an entrance on the ancient Via Flaminia and one toward the Campus Martius.

The problem is that the Campus Martius is a floodplain and the Tiber, before the embankment walls, did what it wanted. Already in the 2nd century AD the Ara Pacis was suffering from water and humidity: many parts had broken or detached from the main body. The ground level kept rising because of the deposit of silt and sand, so much so that at a certain point the monument had to be surrounded by a brick wall to protect it, and in any case it now stuck out of the ground only from the figured friezes up. 2,000 years later, if you want to understand how much that ground has risen, just look at the level of ancient Rome under Palazzo Fiano compared with the current level of the street.

In the Middle Ages the altar met the fate of half of ancient Rome: it became a marble quarry. A marmoraro detached its pieces to make other things. It is not a story of barbarians, it is the normal story of a city that for a thousand years recycled itself, and it is worth remembering when one gets indignant too easily about the demolitions of the 20th century.

The discovery in pieces, scattered across half the world

The first modern rediscovery is from 1568, according to other sources already from 1536: under Palazzo Peretti, on Via in Lucina, a few hundred meters southeast of the place where the monument was later rebuilt, fragments of reliefs came to light. And here begins a dispersal that would be almost comic if it were not tragic. The Saturnia tellus, the most beautiful and best-preserved panel, entered the Medici collections and ended up in the Uffizi. A part was sold to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. A fragment took the road to the Louvre. Yet another arrived at the Vatican Museums. Others stayed at Villa Medici. The altar of Augustus's peace, within two centuries, had become a puzzle scattered between Florence, Paris, the Vatican and who knows where.

More excavations came in 1859, when the relief of Aeneas and the head of Mars from the Lupercal panel were recovered. But only in 1879 did the German archaeologist Federico von Duhn put the accounts together and recognize that those fragments all belonged to the Altar of Augustus. Keep this date in mind: from 1568 to 1879 three centuries went by in which nobody really knew what those beautiful marbles were.

In 1903 regular excavations began, with the interest of the owner of the palace, Edoardo Almagià, directed by the engineer Mariano Cannizzaro and the archaeologist Angiolo Pasqui. They went on officially until April 1904, then unofficially until February 1905, and finally stopped for lack of money: between 1903 and 1905 about 62,000 lire had already been spent, a sum worth over 250,000 euros today. It was an impossible site: they were digging under the foundations of an inhabited building, in the heart of the historic center.

1938, the bimillennium and the reassembly

Between 1918 and 1921 people began to discuss the proposal of Professor Oreste Mattirolo, president of the Piedmontese Society of Archaeology and Fine Arts: gather all the fragments scattered around Italy and the world and put the monument back together. The idea caught on quickly because it fell at the right political moment, or the wrong one, depending on the point of view. People went as far as imagining the celebratory inscriptions to be carved on the reconstructed monument. But it was necessary to wait until 1937 for the excavations to really start again.

In the meantime, in 1909, Rome's new master plan had already provided for the demolition of the buildings around the Mausoleum of Augustus, and in 1932 the demolitions began. They are part of that season of clearances which between the 1920s and 1930s changed the face of the historic center. Mussolini attended them in person, and the Istituto Luce films show him with a pickaxe in hand on the roofs of the houses destined to disappear. The reassembly of the Ara took on an explicit political meaning: the bimillennium of Augustus's birth fell on September 23, 1938, and the regime wanted the altar standing by that date.

From March to December 1937 they dug under Palazzo Fiano with methods that for the time were highly advanced: to extract the fragments from the foundations without making the building collapse, they resorted to freezing the ground. It is not a small detail. They literally froze the soil of the center of Rome to pull out pieces of marble. The reassembly work was extremely difficult, because the fragments were few and the information on the original form of the monument almost nonexistent: they practically had two Roman coins, one from the Neronian age and one from the Domitianic, which depicted the altar seen from two opposite sides. On two coins a monument was reconstructed.

In 1938 the excavations closed and the recovered parts were put back together. The available time was eight or nine months, a trifle, and to fill the documentary gaps the restoration was entrusted to the artist Odoardo Ferretti, professor of drawing and ornament, who had already worked alongside the archaeologists between 1929 and 1932 on the site of Via dell’Impero. The reassembly took place in the Museo delle Terme. In February 1938 Victor Emmanuel III issued a special decree to concentrate in Rome the fragments of the Ara kept in other cities of the Kingdom and to negotiate the recovery of those that had ended up abroad, also through exchanges of state-owned artworks. The Florentine pieces and those of the Vatican Museums thus returned. For the Louvre and Villa Medici there was no way: those reliefs are still there, and on the reconstructed monument you find casts.

On September 23, 1938 the Ara Pacis was inaugurated inside the case designed by Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo, with a roof and load-bearing structure in imitation red porphyry and a base in white travertine. Morpurgo had presented the initial project in 1935, but never managed to build it in full: the Governatorato's funds were running short and then the war came. Instead of marble, travertine and porphyry, cement and substitutes were used, and the result was so far from what had been planned that, in the end, everyone distanced themselves from it. The controversies did not end with the regime: they continued throughout the postwar period.

The war, the sandbags and the decades of discussions

Between 1938 and 1940 Adalberto Libera proposed moving the Ara inside the Mausoleum of Augustus. Then the war: the glass panes of the case were dismantled and stored in a building in San Lorenzo to keep them safe from the bombing, the altar was surrounded with sandbags and access was closed to the public with wooden barriers two meters high. In 1942 the barriers gave way to anti-splinter walls 4.5 meters high at half height, and the monument reopened. On July 19, 1943, in the bombing of San Lorenzo, Morpurgo's glass panes were destroyed.

In 1949 the City reopened the monument to the public by removing the wartime protection and replacing it with enclosure walls 4.5 meters high in faux travertine. And here comes the cruelest paradox of the whole affair: it turned out that the sandbags placed as protection had completely destroyed the entablature. It had been rebuilt in plaster in the restorations of 1937 and 1938, because during the excavations not even a fragment of it had been found. The protection had ruined what it was meant to protect. In the same year the Higher Council for Antiquities and Fine Arts and the Ministry of Public Education announced a competition of ideas to settle the question of moving or restructuring the case, and the proposal of putting the altar inside the Mausoleum came up again.

Around 1950 the case was painted white, in faux travertine. In the 1950s the anti-splinter walls were removed. In 1954 it was found that the 3.5 meters of space around the monument were insufficient for the public to read the friezes in full, and discussion resumed: inside the Mausoleum, in the area where the museum stands today, or in the double-apse hall of the Baths of Diocletian. A commission asked Marcello Piacentini to draw up the conclusions: move the monument toward the Academy of Fine Arts to have six meters of space around it, build on the side toward San Rocco a building to be used as a museum, faced by a garden toward the Lungotevere, and a portico toward the garden. The study of the new project was entrusted again to Morpurgo. Nothing came of it.

Richard Meier’s case, the 2006 museum and the controversies

The idea of replacing Morpurgo's case with a modern museum structure was born from a meeting in Davos between the then mayor Francesco Rutelli and the American architect Richard Meier. In 1996 Rutelli gave the commission to Meier without a competition, and in 1997 the project became public. The criticism started immediately, on two fronts: the style judged too modern for the context, and the method, that is, the direct assignment without a tender or competition. They are two different objections and should be kept separate, because the second remained valid even for those who, in the end, came to like the museum.

In 2000 the project became executive. On September 20 demolition and reconstruction began, and ended in 2006. Only one element of the previous construction survived: the east wall of the base, the one bearing the transcription of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, made on the basis of the text edited by Enrica Malcovati. That wall is there, and you can still read it today from the square. It is the only piece of Morpurgo left standing, and it is no accident that it is the one with Augustus's words on it.

The museum was inaugurated in 2006 in the presence of Mayor Walter Veltroni. During the ceremony a group of demonstrators protested, complaining about the expense, 16 million euros spent and another 24 million allocated, to build what they called an outrage. The building, in steel, travertine, glass and stucco, was the first major architectural and urban intervention carried out in the historic center of Rome since the days of fascism, and this sentence, repeated everywhere, explains by itself why the temperature of the debate was what it was.

The scathing reviews went down in history as much as the building. The New York Times called it a flop and a great disappointment, as ignorant of the context as the fascist case it replaced. Massimiliano Fuksas said it altered the balance of the square. Paolo Portoghesi, that it would have been better not to build it. The archaeologist Adriano La Regina objected to the lack of shielding from sunlight, claiming that the Roman monument had become the pretext for the case and not the other way around. Vittorio Sgarbi, with his usual restraint, dismissed it as a Texan gas pump in the heart of one of the most important historic centers in the world. The Roman public christened it Bara Pacis, because of its squared, horizontal shapes, and it still carries that nickname around.

The verdict was not unanimous, though. Achille Bonito Oliva appreciated the project. The architect Antonino Saggio wrote that the opening of a construction site in the center of Rome is in itself an event for a city by now used only to temporary interventions and to turning everything into a museum. 20 years have passed and I think the second position has held up better than the first: the case has become part of the landscape and has brought here exhibitions that otherwise would have had no space.

Then there is the question of the wall. On the Lungotevere side Meier built a travertine wall that, from the street, half covers the view of the churches of San Rocco and San Girolamo dei Croati. It is one of the things Romans have forgiven him least. In 2008 Gianni Alemanno, just elected mayor, announced his intention to remove the entire case, then scaled back the plan already in June of the same year, speaking of an adjustment and in particular of a reduction of the wall. In 2012 it was talked about again, estimating the cost of the operation at €1,400,000. The wall is still there.

What you will see light up: the four panels

The videomapping works on precise points: the west front, with the panels of Aeneas sacrificing to the Penates and of the Lupercal, the east front with the Tellus and the goddess Roma, and the two great processions on the long sides. It helps to know in advance what you are looking at, because 40 minutes pass quickly and the narration in the headphones runs on.

The Lupercal

Of the Lupercal panel only a few fragments remain, but they are enough to reconstruct the scene: the mythical foundation of Rome. You recognize the armed god Mars, father of the twins and protector of the City, and the shepherd Faustulus. They watch, near the Ficus ruminalis, the she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus, and in the background appear remains of marsh plants. When the projection fills in the gaps, this is the panel where you best understand how little ancient marble we are looking at and how much interpretive work lies behind it.

The Sacrifice of Aeneas to the Penates

On the right, on the same front, the Sacrifice of Aeneas to the Penates. The main figure is Aeneas, son of Venus, although some critics have proposed reading it as Numa Pompilius. Beside him his son Ascanius, or perhaps Augustus, a descendant of Venus, at a rustic altar wrapped in festoons, assisted by two young camilli. First fruits and the white sow of Laurentum are sacrificed. The Penates of Lavinium are present, looking out from a small temple on the rock, at upper left. Aeneas has his head veiled, a cloak that leaves part of the torso uncovered, and the scepter in his hand. Of Ascanius only the right hand resting on a spear has reached us, and part of the garments, in the Eastern style.

The Personification of Roma

On the east front, the relief of the goddess Roma has reached us in very poor condition: on the right you recognize a personification of Roma in Amazon dress, seated on a pile of arms. Little else. It is the panel where the digital reconstruction has the most room for hypothesis and the fewest material footholds, and the narration says so.

The Saturnia tellus

And then there is the masterpiece. The Saturnia tellus has arrived practically intact and is one of the most beautiful reliefs of Roman art. A large matronly figure sits with two infants in her lap and some first fruits. At the sides, two semi-nude nymphs: one seated on a swan in flight, symbol of the air, the other on a sea dragon, symbol of the sea. The two animals recall the formula terra marique, peace on land and sea. The landscape too is allegorical: riverine on the left, with reeds and a vase from which water flows, rocky in the center with flowers, a collapsed heifer and a grazing sheep, marine on the right.

On the identity of the central figure scholars have never agreed: Venus Genetrix, a personification of Italy, or of Pax herself. Probably the interpretations were fused in an ambivalent ideology, and the presence of Venus is not to be excluded, since she would pair with the relief of the personification of Roma, cults that will later be coupled. When this panel lights up in color, the effect is that of a Pompeian fresco materializing on the marble, and it is not a far-fetched comparison: the color choice is also based on comparison with Roman painting, Pompeian in particular.

The two processions and who walks in them

On the long sides runs the frieze of the procession for the vow of the Ara, divided into two parts: an official one, with the priests, and a semi-official one, with Augustus's family. It should be read as a single scene spread over four sections. The whole recalls the Panathenaic frieze of the Parthenon, and the reference is deliberate: Augustus wanted classical Greece as the yardstick.

Beware, though, of one thing few people know and that changes the way you look at the frieze: it is not a snapshot of a procession that actually took place. It cannot be 13 BC, because Augustus would become pontifex maximus only in 12. It cannot be 9 BC, because by that date Agrippa was already dead and Tiberius and Drusus were busy with the campaigns in Illyricum and Germany. It is an ideal political depiction, built at a desk, and it should be read in relation to the uncertainties over the succession in those years, which would find a provisional solution in 6 BC with the voluntary exile of Tiberius.

The south side is the best preserved and the most important. The procession begins with the lictors, traditionally 12, a camillus carrying the sacred box of the pontifical college and the lictor proximus, who walks backward because he must not turn his back on the magistrate and high priest. The toga-clad men follow, starting with Augustus, head veiled, in the robes of pontifex maximus. The official procession is closed by the four major flamines, dialis, martialis, quirinalis and iulialis. The flamen iulialis is the only one with a true individual physiognomy, because he was a real relative of Augustus, Sextus Appuleius. Then the flaminius lictor, head covered and sacred axe on his shoulder.

After a sharp break the imperial family begins, arranged according to the dynastic line. First Agrippa, who died in 12 BC, in profile and with his head covered. Then little Gaius Caesar, grandson and adopted son of Augustus. Then Julia the Elder, daughter of Augustus, or perhaps Livia, before Tiberius. A figure in the background remains unknown. The next woman is Antonia the Younger, who holds by the hand little Germanicus, her son and Drusus the Elder's, who follows right after. Then Antonia the Elder with her children Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, future father of Nero, and Domitia, followed by her husband Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. Finally there is a man who gestures for silence to the children: for years it was said to be Maecenas or Horace, but the most accredited hypothesis today identifies him with one of the Appulei, perhaps Marcus, consul in 20 BC, son of a half-sister of Augustus and brother of the flamen iulialis.

The north side is in worse shape and has almost all its heads remade in the 16th century. There are the augurs and the quindecemviri sacris faciundis, recognizable by the camillus with the acerra decorated with the symbols of Apollo, then the septemviri epulones. The imperial family then starts again, opened by Lucius Caesar and his mother Julia the Elder, who thus find themselves at the same height as Agrippa on the other side. A boy dressed as a camillus follows, perhaps the son of Iullus Antonius. Then Claudia Marcella the Elder with the consul Iullus Antonius and little Julia the Younger, then Claudia Marcella the Younger with her son and her husband Sextus Appuleius, consul in 29 BC, of whom very few fragments remain.

The message is as clear as an org chart: the succession to the throne depicted in two main branches, one per side, headed by Julia and Agrippa, then the sons of Livia, then the two Antonias and the two Marcellas. Knowing this, before you go in, will make you look at the wall in a completely different way. It is not a religious procession: it is a family tree carved in marble, and it is propaganda of the most refined kind.

A curiosity about L’Ara si rivela: the videomapping on the Ara Pacis

The curiosity is that this is not the first time. The Ara Pacis was the first monument of the Roman age in the world to be colored with digital projectors, and the date is precise: on November 22, 2009, from 21:00 to midnight, the main side and the secondary one were lit experimentally by overlaying color images on the real friezes. It was a single evening, three hours, an experiment. The technique had never been applied to a Roman monument before then.

It worked so well that from then on it spread everywhere. Palazzo Valentini in Rome had already opened in December 2007 and since 2011 its exhibition has become permanent. In 2014 it was the turn of the Forum of Augustus in Rome and the Etruscan necropolis of Banditaccia at Cerveteri, in 2015 the Forum of Caesar. Every time you went to see one of those light shows in the Imperial Forums, you were reaping the fruit of an experiment born here, on this altar, on a November night in 2009.

There is a second curiosity, and it is less told. In 2016, on October 14, the museum launched another initiative, Ara com’era, based on virtual reality headsets. Visitors could observe the altar and the Campus Martius as they were 2,000 years ago, fly virtually over the plain of 9 BC, sit next to the altar and see figures of ancient Rome moving around them at 360 degrees. It also worked in augmented reality, overlaying on the images captured by the headset's camera the missing parts of the monument and its original coloring, but only one section at a time, from eight preset points of view, because the hardware of the time could not handle more. In practice, in 20 years this museum has dreamed the same dream three times, with three different technologies, and L’Ara si rivela is the version in which the dream finally works without anyone having to put a helmet on their head.

Something nobody tells you about L’Ara si rivela: the videomapping on the Ara Pacis

The colors you see projected are not a graphic invention and are not a scientific certainty either. They are a documented hypothesis, and it is an enormous difference that almost nobody explains.

The choice of the individual colorings was made on the basis of laboratory analyses of the surviving traces, comparisons with Roman painting, Pompeian in particular, and chromatic research on ancient Greek and Roman architecture and sculpture. For the plant part, which on the Ara Pacis occupies half of the outer surface with its acanthus scrolls, the basis was a 2010 study that recognized over 50 plant species really existing in nature carved among those vines. 50 identifiable botanical species: not generic decoration, but an herbarium. Whoever worked on that study looked leaf by leaf.

The study group on the chromatic hypothesis was born in the years of the construction of the new museum. They started by building a three-dimensional model of the altar, onto which the restitution of color was applied according to philological and historical-stylistic criteria. Only afterward, from the model, came the idea of projecting rays of colored light directly onto the marble surfaces. The order of the factors matters: first philology, then the show.

The point I want to leave you with is this. When a bright red comes out on a figure's cloak, that is not the certainty that the cloak was red. It is the best hypothesis that can be reconstructed today, declared as such. And the fact that it is a light projection and not a coat of paint is exactly what makes it honest: it switches off. If in 10 years a new analysis said that red was an ochre, it would be enough to change a file. A real pictorial restoration, on ancient marble, would be irreversible and nobody would ever do it. The videomapping here is not a special effect, it is a method of reversible restitution. It is the reason this technology has taken hold in archaeology and not only in shows.

Then there is one thing nobody will ever tell you at the ticket office: a large part of what you see lit up is 20th-century integration. The entablature, for example, is entirely reconstructed, with no ancient parts, because not a fragment of it was ever found. The heads of the north side are remade in the 16th century. The reliefs left at the Louvre and Villa Medici are casts. When the light turns on those surfaces it does not distinguish between Augustan marble and 1938 plaster, and the narration tells you so, but you have to know it to catch it.

The advice I give you for visiting L’Ara si rivela: the videomapping on the Ara Pacis

Do the museum by day and the show in the evening, in this order, and possibly not on the same day.

The reason is simple: the ticket for the evening experience is valid only for the experience. It does not include the museum visit. And 40 minutes in the dark, with the voice in the headphones running on, is not the right time to learn who Antonia the Younger was. If you arrive here without ever having looked at the friezes calmly, in daylight, with the time to walk around the enclosure two or three times, you will enjoy the show as a show and you will miss half of what it tells. If instead you come after already getting to know the monument, you will recognize the figures one by one as they light up, and at that point the whole thing becomes truly moving.

Second point: buy in advance. The spots per slot are few, in the order of a few dozen people, and on weekends they sell out. Tickets are neither refundable nor changeable, even in case of delay or error at the time of purchase, and the only case in which you can ask for a refund or a date change is the cancellation of the event. Show up at least a quarter of an hour before the time of the slot. Anyone who arrives at the exact time finds the line at the coat check and the distribution of headphones still under way.

Third point: dress for standing still. The route winds around the enclosure and also inside the monument, you walk little but you stand a lot, and the case in the evening is climate-controlled for the marble, not for you. In winter bring something to put on. In summer, on the contrary, the air conditioning is a relief after the Lungotevere.

Fourth point, and it applies if you have children: below a certain age admission is free but the headphone device is not handed out, so the youngest follow without audio. For them the museum also organizes dedicated educational activities, with specific school rates for groups. If the child is seven or eight and has already seen something Roman, the show captures them. If they are three, bring them another time.

Fifth and last: always check the museum's notices page before planning the evening. Special openings and holiday closures are added and removed, and the calendar of evenings changes with the season, with evening hours that shift by an hour between the winter and summer schedules. It is the only source that counts.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely cited

That ancient statues were painted many people now know. It has entered common discourse, there have been exhibitions across half of Europe on ancient polychromy, and the phrase white marble is a neoclassical misunderstanding is heard repeated everywhere. So far, well known.

What is cited much less is the practical consequence, and it is a consequence that concerns the taste of all of us. The idea that classical antiquity was white, sober, monochrome is not an innocent error: it is an aesthetic that shaped European public architecture for two and a half centuries. Winckelmann theorized the superiority of white in the mid-1700s, neoclassicism turned it into dogma, and from there descends a chain that reaches the white marble palaces of the 19th-century capitals and, in certain respects, the absolute white of Meier's case. There is an almost comic short circuit in all this: the whitest American architect of the 20th century built a candid container around a monument that was never candid, and today inside that container color is projected to prove it.

The second rarely cited fact concerns the context. The Ara Pacis, today, we look at isolated, raised on a podium, inside a glass box, with two meters of corridor around it. In antiquity it was surrounded by other things: the Mausoleum of Augustus not far away, the obelisk that served as the gnomon of the great Augustan sundial, the Ustrinum, the Campus Martius with its porticoes. It was a piece of an enormous urban discourse, all dedicated to Augustus and his family, that covered a portion of the city. The isolation in which we see it today is the result of 20th-century choices, not of the will of those who built it. When the evening narration makes you fly over the ancient Campus Martius, what you are recovering is precisely the lost context, and it is the show's greatest gift.

Third well-known and little-spoken element: the monument we see is a reconstruction. All the manuals say so, but in current perception the Ara Pacis remains an intact ancient object, while it is a 1938 assemblage put together in nine months, with plaster integrations, casts in place of the originals that ended up abroad, 16th-century heads and an entablature invented on the basis of two coins. This takes nothing away from its beauty or its importance. But it changes the way of looking at it: it is not a find, it is a restoration that has in turn become a historical document, of the Rome of the 1930s as much as of Augustus's.

The right photo to take at L’Ara si rivela: the videomapping on the Ara Pacis

Inside, during the show, the best photo is the one you won't take. I mean it: the 40 minutes are in the dark, the colors change continuously, the phone tries to compensate and returns a washed-out mush that looks like nothing of what you saw with your eyes. Anyone who tries comes out with 20 unwatchable images and the memory of having spent the show looking at a six-inch screen. If you really must, pick a single moment, the one with the Saturnia tellus fully lit, hold the phone still resting on the parapet, and that's it. For the rest, look.

The photo that is truly worth it, the one nobody takes, is outside, and it comes twice a day. The first is from Piazza Augusto Imperatore at the blue hour, that is, in the 20 minutes after sunset, when the light of the sky and the artificial light of the case have the same intensity. At that moment the glass becomes transparent, the lit altar is seen from outside as if in an aquarium, and in the foreground you have the mound of the Mausoleum of Augustus. In a single frame there is room for 2,000 years: the tomb of 28 BC, the altar of 9 BC, the square of the 1930s and the museum of 2006. I don't know other places in Rome where four eras compose so well without having to climb anywhere.

The second is from the Lungotevere, from the opposite sidewalk, looking toward the museum with the plane trees above closing the frame. In the evening the travertine flank stays dark and the glass band lights up like a horizontal strip. It is the image that explains better than a thousand words why the building was nicknamed as it was nicknamed, and also why it has a strength of its own. If instead you are looking for the elegant photo and not the polemical one, turn the corner onto Via di Ripetta and frame the case with the facade of the church of San Rocco beside it: there the dialogue between the Baroque and modernism works, and you understand what Meier was looking for.

A technical tip, since we are talking about the evening. No flash, ever, neither inside nor against the glass: it bounces back and ruins everything. Rest the phone on a low wall or on the parapet and use long exposure, if your device has it. And give priority to the sky: in the blue hours the Roman sky above the Lungotevere has a tone that lasts very briefly and does half the job by itself.

Some important events that happened here in history

It is worth lining up the dates, because this piece of the city has piled up quite a few and almost all of them weigh heavily.

On July 4 of 13 BC the Senate decrees the construction of the altar for Augustus's return from Spain and Gaul. On January 30 of 9 BC the solemn consecration takes place, on Livia's birthday. From that moment the altar hosts an annual sacrifice celebrated by magistrates, priests and Vestals. In the 2nd century AD the monument is already in trouble because of humidity and the rising ground level.

In 1568, or perhaps already in 1536, the first fragments resurface under Palazzo Peretti on Via in Lucina. In 1859 the relief of Aeneas and the head of Mars come out. In 1879 Federico von Duhn finally understands which monument they belong to. Between 1903 and 1905 they dig under the palace with the support of the owner Edoardo Almagià, under the direction of Cannizzaro and Pasqui, until the money runs out.

In 1909 the master plan provides for the demolition of the buildings around the Mausoleum. In 1932 the demolitions begin. In March 1937 the excavations under Palazzo Fiano resume, with the ground frozen so as not to make the building collapse, and continue until December. On September 23, 1937 the Augustan Bimillennium officially opens and the placement of the altar in the space cleared between the river and the mausoleum is announced. In February 1938 a royal decree allows the fragments scattered across the Kingdom to be concentrated in Rome and the return of those abroad to be negotiated. On September 23, 1938 the Ara Pacis is inaugurated inside Morpurgo's case.

On November 7, 1938, a few weeks after the inauguration, the debate on moving the altar begins, with Oriolo Frezzotti's proposal to take it to Piazzale Romolo e Remo. It is a debate that will last until the 2000s. Between 1938 and 1940 Adalberto Libera proposes placing it inside the Mausoleum. During the war the glass panes are dismantled and taken to San Lorenzo, and on July 19, 1943 the bombing of the neighborhood destroys them. In 1942 the anti-splinter walls 4.5 meters high are built. In 1949 it reopens to the public and it is discovered that the sandbags have destroyed the plaster entablature.

In 1954 three alternative placement hypotheses are discussed. Between 1968 and 1969 the Rotary Club's Ara Pacis prize is born. In 1970, with the contribution of the Rotary Club of Rome, the building is restored according to the Morpurgo project. In 1996 Rutelli gives the commission to Richard Meier without a competition and in 1997 the project becomes public. On September 20, 2000 demolition and construction begin. On August 8, 2002 State and City agree on a joint scientific committee for the guidelines on the redevelopment of Piazza Augusto Imperatore. In 2004 the idea of the underpass is born, never realized.

In 2006 the Museo dell’Ara Pacis is inaugurated with Walter Veltroni as mayor, amid protests and scathing reviews. On November 22, 2009 the first experimental digital coloring takes place, three hours, the first application in the world of this technique to a Roman monument. In 2010 a study identifies over 50 plant species among the acanthus scrolls. On October 14, 2016 Ara com’era starts with virtual reality headsets. In 2026 comes L’Ara si rivela, the permanent videomapping scheduled on the calendar evenings until the end of the year.

Lined up, these dates tell a single story: a monument that no era has ever managed to leave in peace. Built to celebrate peace, it has spent 2,000 years being fought over, dismantled, moved, debated, covered, uncovered, and now finally lit up.

Who passed through L’Ara si rivela: the videomapping on the Ara Pacis

If we mean who has passed through this place, the list is of the awe-inspiring kind, and it begins with the people carved on the walls.

On the marble are Augustus as pontifex maximus, Livia, Agrippa, Tiberius, Drusus the Elder, Antonia the Elder and Antonia the Younger, little Germanicus held by the hand, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, Julia the Elder and Julia the Younger, Claudia Marcella the Elder and the Younger, Iullus Antonius, Sextus Appuleius, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus who will be Nero's father. It is the family portrait of the Julio-Claudian dynasty at the moment when it was being decided who would inherit the world. Quite a few of them will end badly, exiled or poisoned or accused, but here they are all still together, in line, on an afternoon that never existed.

Then there are the mythical figures: Aeneas with his head veiled, Ascanius, the Penates of Lavinium, armed Mars, the shepherd Faustulus, Romulus and Remus under the she-wolf, the goddess Roma seated on the arms, and that great maternal figure who could be Venus or Italia or Peace in person.

Among the living, the thickest passage is that of architects and archaeologists. Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo, who built the 1938 case here and who had already designed the Museum of the Roman Ships of Nemi. Odoardo Ferretti, the drawing professor to whom the restoration, impossible in nine months, was entrusted. Giuseppe Moretti, who wrote the fundamental volume on the Ara Pacis in 1946. Marcello Piacentini, called in after the war to say how to settle the matter. Adalberto Libera and Oriolo Frezzotti with their proposals for moving it. Then Erika Simon, Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Mario Torelli, Filippo Coarelli, Eugenio La Rocca, David Castriota, Giulia Caneva with her study on Augustus's botanical code: all names who have written decisive pages on this monument.

And of course Richard Meier, who here carried out the first major architectural intervention in the historic center of Rome since the days of fascism, and with him the band of those who panned it and those who defended it: Massimiliano Fuksas, Paolo Portoghesi, Adriano La Regina, Vittorio Sgarbi on one side, Achille Bonito Oliva and Antonino Saggio on the other. Francesco Rutelli, who called him in at Davos. Walter Veltroni, who inaugurated. Gianni Alemanno, who threatened to tear it down and then didn't.

As for the public, for years the museum has run between 200,000 and 300,000 visitors a year, with a peak of almost 288,000 in 2017 and leaner seasons around 200,000. These are numbers that say something interesting: the Colosseum crowd does not pass through here, a public that chooses to come does. And the videomapping evenings, with slots of a few dozen people, are the opposite extreme of the mass visit. It is the kind of experience you do in 40 minutes and remember for years.

It is worth adding that the museum regularly hosts exhibitions of international appeal, and in 2026 it is the turn of the great photographic retrospective Robert Mapplethorpe at the Ara Pacis. Whoever plans the day well can take the exhibition and the evening show in the same place, a few hours apart.

What to see nearby, before or after the show

The videomapping evening ends late and leaves you with a desire to walk. The natural route starts from the Mausoleum of Augustus, which you have right beside you: the circular mound the emperor had built in 28 BC, the largest tomb of the ancient world, reopened to the public after decades of neglect. Look at it at night from the balustrade of the square, with the lit case behind you.

From there, along Via di Ripetta, you reach Piazza del Popolo in a 10-minute walk: the square, the Flaminio obelisk brought to Rome by Augustus himself, the twin churches, the terrace of the Pincio above. Anyone with energy left goes up to the Pincio and looks at the city from above, which at that hour is almost empty.

In the opposite direction, toward the south, Via Tomacelli leads in five minutes to Via del Corso and from there to the heart of the Campus Martius: Piazza di Montecitorio with the obelisk that was the gnomon of Augustus's sundial, the same urban operation of which the Ara Pacis was part. Then the Pantheon, Piazza Navona and, if you stretch it, Largo di Torre Argentina. Anyone who wants to understand the Augustan design of the district should do exactly this route, from the altar to the obelisk of Montecitorio, and at that point everything fits together.

Crossing Ponte Cavour you reach Castel Sant'Angelo in 20 minutes, which at night is one of the best free shows in the city. And for those who want to stay on the theme of ancient polychromy and Roman sculpture, the most logical next stop is the Capitoline Museums, where the discussion on the colors of the ancient world widens, or the Centrale Montemartini, where the statues live alongside diesel engines and the effect is another form of the same short circuit between ancient and modern that you breathe inside Meier's case.

If instead you are in the middle of a Roman archaeological itinerary, the axis to keep is the one joining Trajan's Markets, the Palatine Hill and the Colosseum, with the Ara Pacis as the initial Augustan chapter. Chronologically it is the starting point: before the Flavians, before Trajan, there is him.

How much time you need and how to fit in the evening

The experience lasts around 40 minutes, to which you must add the recommended quarter of an hour early and a few minutes for the coat check and the return of the headphones. In practice, a good hour between entering and leaving. If you take the earlier evening slot, have dinner afterward. If you take the last one, eat first, because at that hour the kitchens in the neighborhood start closing and you would end up looking for pizza by the slice on Via del Corso.

The best way to build the day is this. In the afternoon, a museum visit with ordinary admission and time for the current exhibition. Then a two-hour break: you go out, walk around the Mausoleum and Piazza del Popolo, have a drink in the neighborhood. Then you go back in for the evening videomapping slot. This way you arrive at the show with the friezes already in your eyes and the difference is dizzying.

If instead you have only one evening and nothing else, it is perfectly fine too: the narration in the headphones is built for people who know nothing and accompanies you. But at least read the names of the four panels before going in, and look at the procession frieze from outside, from the square, while you wait for your slot. Five minutes are enough and they change the evening.

Frequently asked questions about L'Ara si rivela, the videomapping on the Ara Pacis

What is "L'Ara si rivela"?

"L'Ara si rivela" is a videomapping show projected onto the Ara Pacis, the Roman altar built by Augustus and consecrated in 9 BC. The projection measures the irregular surface of the monument in three dimensions and calibrates the light so as to reconstruct on the friezes the original colors, hypothesized on the basis of laboratory analyses and comparisons with Pompeian painting.

How long does the show last?

The videomapping experience on the Ara Pacis lasts around 40 minutes, to which you must add the recommended quarter of an hour early and a few minutes for the coat check and the return of the headphones. In practice it's best to allow a good hour between entering and leaving.

Does the evening show ticket also include the museum visit?

No, the ticket for the evening videomapping experience is valid only for the show and does not include the visit to the Museo dell'Ara Pacis. The advice is to do the museum by day, calmly, and the show in the evening, possibly not on the same day, because 40 minutes in the dark are not the right time to learn to recognize the carved figures.

Where is the Museo dell'Ara Pacis?

The Museo dell'Ara Pacis is on Lungotevere in Augusta, at the corner with Via Tomacelli, in the Campo Marzio district, halfway between Piazza del Popolo and Ponte Cavour. You can get there on foot from the center along Via di Ripetta, which runs down from Piazza del Popolo parallel to the Tiber.

Is it better to do the museum first or the show first?

It is better to do the museum first, by day, and then the show in the evening. Seeing the friezes calmly and in natural light before the videomapping helps you recognize the figures and scenes when they are then reconstructed in color during the 40 minutes of evening projection.

Is this the first time the Ara Pacis has been lit with colored projections?

No: the Ara Pacis was the first monument of the Roman age in the world to be colored with digital projectors, already on November 22, 2009, when for a single three-hour evening, from 21:00 to midnight, the main side and the secondary one were lit experimentally by overlaying color images on the real friezes.

Can you take photographs during the show?

It is not recommended: during the 40 minutes in the dark the colors change continuously and the phone compensates poorly for the scene, returning washed-out images that look nothing like what you see with your eyes. It's better to leave the phone in your pocket and enjoy the projection live.

A last thought, and where to find the rest

I confess I was prejudiced. Immersive experiences, multimedia routes, light shows in museums: there are many and most are smoke, a way of selling the same ticket twice by replacing knowledge with effect. Here it is not so, and the reason is precise: the color projected on the Ara Pacis adds nothing to the monument, it gives back something it had and lost. It is the opposite of a special effect. It is philology done with projectors.

And then there is that narrative choice to tell the 20th century too, the collectors, the restorers, the archaeologists, the controversies, the excavations with frozen ground under Palazzo Fiano. A monument that admits to having been reassembled, and chooses to tell it while it lights up, is a monument that trusts its audience. It doesn't happen often, and it deserves the evening.

Those who organize trips and groups, and need to fit evenings like this into a program that has to work to the minute, will find the trade and the right tools on Tour Leader Pro, which has dealt with tourist accompaniment and group management in Italy for years. Those who are instead building an Italian trip on their own, maybe with friends or relatives arriving from abroad who want to see the right things in the right order here in Rome, can start from the English-language guides of Italy Planner, which has on Italy from north to south the material you need to avoid wasting days. We stay here to tell you about Rome evening by evening.