Museo Aristaios, Auditorium Parco della Musica, Sinopoli Collection

The Museo Aristaios occupies the Sala del Peduncolo of the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, Viale Pietro de Coubertin 30, 00196 Rome. The Ministry of Culture's records give the internal entrance on Largo Luciano Berio, which is the piazza around which the three concert halls revolve. Entry is free, for everyone, with no ticket and no reservation. The official Auditorium website lists weekend opening: Saturdays from 11:00 to 18:00 on standard time and from 11:00 to 20:00 on daylight saving time, Sundays and holidays from 10:00 to 18:00 on standard time and from 10:00 to 20:00 on daylight saving time. The same applies to the nearby Archaeological Museum of the Roman villa, which is visited under the same rules and with the same free entry. The exhibition spaces may stay closed when the Auditorium hosts events that occupy their rooms. Before leaving it's worth making a phone call to 06 80241281 or reading the official page on auditorium.com. You get there by buses 53, 168, 910 and 982 to Piazza Apollodoro or Piazza Mancini, or by metro line A to Flaminio and then line 2, which connects Piazzale Flaminio to Piazza Mancini and which, because of work on Viale delle Belle Arti, runs with replacement buses on the same route. The updated service is published by Roma Servizi per la Mobilità. Anyone arriving by car finds the Auditorium's underground parking, paid, with about a thousand spaces. For the visit to the two museums allow a good hour and a half: 90 minutes if you really look at the vases, 40 if you just walk through.

If you're building a Roman itinerary that doesn't end with the Colosseum-Vatican-Trevi Fountain triangle, the starting point is the guide to Rome's tourist attractions, where small, free museums live alongside the big names.

What the Museo Aristaios really is

Let's start with the misunderstanding, because it is the only serious obstacle between the visitor and this place. The Museo Aristaios is not a temporary exhibition of the Auditorium, it is not a courtesy display put there to fill a corridor, it is not a cultural fallback for people waiting for the concert to start. It is a state archaeological museum in every respect, registered with the Ministry of Culture, with 161 finds on permanent display over more than 300 square meters. The fact that it sits inside a music complex designed by Renzo Piano, and not inside a 16th-century palace with a marble staircase, changes the atmosphere of the visit and doesn't change by a hair the quality of what is in the display cases.

The collection is the private one of Giuseppe Sinopoli, conductor, composer, physician, archaeologist. At his death, in 2001, his heirs kept the pieces. In 2010 the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities bought them from the family, and in 2012 it designated them for permanent display in this hall of the Auditorium, with an agreement among the Ministry, Roma Capitale and the Fondazione Musica per Roma. The inauguration took place on December 11, 2012 and the opening to the public the next day. Since then the museum has remained what it was on the first day: free, silent, almost always empty.

We'll tell you our opinion right away. The Museo Aristaios is the best ratio of quality to effort that Rome offers when it comes to Greek ceramics. At Villa Giulia you walk for kilometers through endless rooms and come out with a full head and dead legs. At the Vatican Museums the Etruscan section is splendid and you reach it after two hours of corridors. Here, in 40 minutes, you look at 161 pieces chosen one by one by a collector who knew exactly what he was buying. It is not an encyclopedic museum and doesn't claim to be. It's an anthology.

Why an archaeological museum inside the Auditorium Parco della Musica

The coincidence is not as arbitrary as it seems. The Auditorium was born on top of an archaeological area: the excavations for the foundations, between 1995 and 1998, brought to light a Roman villa with more than 2,000 square meters of surface, whose remains are now visible in situ a few steps further on. Renzo Piano's building had to bend to that discovery, and the very plan of the complex bears the mark of that negotiation between construction site and archaeology. When the Ministry looked for a home for the Sinopoli collection, the Auditorium already had an archaeological museum, already had an audience and had a very strong biographical reason: here there is a concert hall named after Giuseppe Sinopoli, the Sala Sinopoli, the first of the three to be inaugurated, on April 21, 2002. Putting his collection 50 meters from the hall that bears his name was one of the few truly elegant decisions made in this city on the subject of museums.

Giuseppe Sinopoli, the man who put this collection together

If you leave the Museo Aristaios without knowing who Giuseppe Sinopoli was, you have missed half the visit. The captions talk about ceramics. The real story is that of a man who did, fully and seriously, three trades that usually suffice to fill three lives.

The physician

He was born in Venice on November 2, 1946, to a father from Messina and a Venetian mother of Messinese origin. In 1950 the family moved to Messina, where it stayed until 1963. He studied music at the conservatories of Messina and Venice, and meanwhile enrolled in medicine at the University of Padua. He graduated in medicine and surgery in 1972, with a thesis in criminal anthropology. It was not a degree for show. Sinopoli practiced, worked in psychiatry, and all his life kept reading the human mind with the tools of the clinician. Anyone who heard him speak of Mahler or Strauss remembers that the words of psychopathology kept returning in his analyses: obsession, mourning, the compulsion to repeat. It was not an affectation. It was his first alphabet.

The composer

Before being the conductor the world would come to know, Sinopoli was an avant-garde composer, and not an amateur. He studied organ, harmony and counterpoint. He attended the summer courses at Darmstadt, the laboratory of new European music, where he met György Ligeti and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He was a pupil of Franco Donatoni at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. Between 1968 and 1981 he wrote 24 works. In 1972 he taught contemporary and electronic music at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory in Venice. In 1975 he founded the Ensemble Bruno Maderna. His opera, Lou Salomé, with a libretto by Karl Dietrich Gräwe, was staged at the Nationaltheater in Munich in 1981 and revived at La Fenice in Venice in 2011, 10 years after his death. Then he stopped. A composer who at 35 closes the notebook and devotes himself entirely to the baton is a rare thing, and it's worth keeping in mind in front of the display cases: the same head that had built serial scores was choosing, in those same years, one Attic lekythos instead of another.

The conductor

He learned conducting in Venice from Bruno Maderna and in Vienna from Hans Swarowsky, the teacher who trained half a generation of European conductors. From there the career runs. Music director of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome from 1983 to 1987. Principal conductor of the Philharmonia in London from 1984 to 1994, and music director from 1987. Artistic director of the music section of the Taormina festival from 1989 to 1997. Principal conductor of the Dresden Staatskapelle from 1992, the oldest orchestra in the world among those still active, which is a kind of consecration. Debut at La Scala in 1994. Artistic and music director of the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma from 1999 to 2001. At Bayreuth he conducted Tannhäuser in 1985 and in 2000 the Ring des Nibelungen, the first Italian in the history of the Wagnerian festival to conduct the Tetralogy.

An opinion, since we're at it: Sinopoli was one of the most debated conductors of his time, loved and hated with the same intensity. His readings of Mahler divided audiences because he slowed down where nobody slowed down and brought out inner lines the ear didn't expect. Those who accused him of intellectualism were wrong about the method and perhaps a little right about the effect. But nobody, not even his fiercest critics, ever disputed his culture.

The archaeologist

And here we come to the point that makes this museum a unique case. Sinopoli was not a collector who bought to decorate. He was enrolled in a degree course in archaeology at the University of Rome La Sapienza and was about to defend his thesis. The defense was set for the days immediately after his last concert. He died before, and the degree in archaeology was awarded to him posthumously: the thesis was supposed to be defended on the very day of his funeral. There are few biographical details as cruel and as revealing. A man at the peak of the world's musical careers who, at 54, takes university exams like any other student because he wants the real title, not the honorary degree that anyone would have signed for him.

This changes the way you look at the display cases. The 161 works of the Museo Aristaios are not the trophies of a wealthy enthusiast. They are the working material of a scholar who had learned to recognize a hand, to date a profile, to tell an Attic slip from an Italiot imitation. The collection has a textbook coherence: it covers the stages of ancient ceramics as a university course would, from the Aegean prehistory to the Hellenistic Magna Graecia, with examples chosen to be didactic as well as beautiful.

The death in Berlin

On April 20, 2001 Sinopoli was conducting Giuseppe Verdi's Aida at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. He was struck by a heart attack on the podium, during the performance. He was 54. The lying in state was set up on April 23 in the Palazzo Senatorio on the Capitoline Hill. The funeral was celebrated on April 24 in the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, in the presence of the President of the Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and the Prime Minister Giuliano Amato. He is buried at the Verano.

Anyone who knows Aida knows that the third act is the Nile act, and that the fourth is the one of the walled-up tomb. There is nothing poetic about a heart attack and I don't want to make literature of it. But it's worth remembering, in front of a display case of Greek funerary vases, that the man who bought them died conducting an opera that ends underground.

The catalog that gave the museum its name

The collection was already known to scholars long before becoming a museum. In 1995 Marsilio published in Venice a large-format volume, 460 pages and over 500 illustrations, titled Aristaios. La collezione Giuseppe Sinopoli, edited by Enrico Paribeni, one of the major Italian archaeologists of the 20th century and a specialist in Greek sculpture and ceramics. The catalog then listed 120 pieces, from the pre-classical Aegean to the fourth century BC. The core later acquired by the State and now on display numbers 161. The museum's name comes from there: Aristaios is the Greek form of the name Aristaeus, and the title that Paribeni and Sinopoli chose for the book became, 17 years later, the sign over the hall.

Aristaeus, the farmer god who gives his name to the Museo Aristaios

Aristaeus, in ancient Greek Aristàios, is a minor figure of mythology and for that very reason interesting: he is not a war hero of Troy, he is a god of the fields, a technician of the agrarian world, the patron of those who work the land. A collector who chooses him instead of Apollo or Dionysus is declaring something about his own taste.

Son of Apollo and Cyrene

The canonical genealogy makes him the son of the god Apollo and the nymph Cyrene, a princess whose father was Hypseus, king of the Lapiths. Other versions make him the son of Cleine. Cyrene was a huntress, and the myth tells that Apollo saw her fighting a lion bare-handed on Mount Pelion and took her to Libya, where he gave her the name of the city that would rise there. Aristaeus was born of that union and was raised by the Horae and by Gaia, or by the centaur Chiron, depending on the source. The deities taught him the arts that he would then teach to men.

The bees, the bugonia and Virgil's Georgics

The text that made Aristaeus immortal in Western culture is the fourth book of Virgil's Georgics, the poem that the poet of Andes composed between 37 and 30 BC for Maecenas. The fourth book is devoted to bees, and closes with an epyllion that is among the most famous pages of Latin poetry. Aristaeus loses all his hives: the bees die, one after another, without explanation. He goes to his mother Cyrene, at the bottom of the river, and she sends him to question Proteus, the old man of the sea who knows everything and whom you have to seize and hold tight while he transforms. Proteus reveals the reason for the punishment. Aristaeus had pursued Eurydice, the bride of Orpheus, on the day of the wedding. Fleeing through the grass she had stepped on a snake and died of it. The nymphs, Eurydice's companions, had killed Aristaeus's bees in revenge. It is within this frame that Virgil inserts the story of Orpheus who descends to the Underworld, wins Eurydice back, turns around and loses her forever.

The conclusion is technical and ferocious at once: Aristaeus, following Cyrene's instructions, sacrifices four bulls and four heifers, lets the carcasses rot and after nine days sees a swarm of new bees come out of them. This is the bugonia, the spontaneous generation of bees from the bodies of oxen, an ancient belief that Virgil takes seriously and turns into an image of rebirth. Anyone visiting the Museo Aristaios would do well to reread those 200 lines the evening before. They change the color of the visit.

Aristaeus in Sardinia and the founding of Caralis

Then there is the western strand of the myth, the one that ties Aristaeus to Sardinia. The Latin writer Gaius Julius Solinus, author in the third century of the De mirabilibus mundi, tells that the Greek hero reached Sardinia from Boeotia and founded the ancient Caralis, present-day Cagliari. According to the tradition reported by Solinus, Aristaeus introduced to the island the art of making cheese and oil and the way of raising bees for honey and wax. He reconciled the native peoples fighting among themselves and reigned over the city he had founded. Sallust and Pausanias add that he was accompanied by Daedalus, and that Daedalus would be the maker of the imposing Daedalic works, that is, the nuraghi. The anachronism is evident and the ancients themselves noticed it: a Cretan myth and a Sardinian architecture that precedes by centuries any Greek contact. It should be taken for what it is, an etiological explanation built after the fact by authors who saw the nuraghi and looked for a Greek name to give to whoever had raised them.

The cult of Aristaeus in Sardinia, however, is not only literary. A small statue depicting the god, found at Dule in the territory of Oliena, in Barbagia, indicates that his name circulated also among the Nuragic peoples. It is an archaeological datum, and as such it must be kept distinct from Solinus's account, which is literary tradition.

The god of the fields in Sicily

Aristaeus was honored as a god in many places in Greece for having taught men beekeeping, cheese production and herding. He had a particular honor in Sicily, where he was one of the rural deities, with a statue erected at Syracuse in the temple of Bacchus. At times he was assimilated to the god Pan, which is consistent: two deities of the pastoral world, both tied to the flock, the countryside and a religiosity that asked not for marble temples but for trees and springs. For a museum that displays vases for the symposium, for the tomb and for the kitchen, that is, the objects of ancient daily life and not the marbles of kings, such a patron is a choice of side.

The Sala del Peduncolo and the layout of the Museo Aristaios

The name of the hall makes people smile the first time they hear it. The peduncolo (stalk), in the Auditorium's construction-site slang, is the narrow, elongated body that connects the buildings of the concert halls: a passage, a connective, one of those spaces that in public buildings end up hosting vending machines and signage. Here it became a museum, and the result is one of the best museum layouts in Rome of the last 20 years. It is signed by the studio Alvisi Kirimoto, that is, Massimo Alvisi and Junko Kirimoto, with Alessandra Spiezia and Arabella Rocca, in 2012, with funding from the Ministry and a contribution from the Rome Chamber of Commerce.

Two glass envelopes hung on the brick wall

The declared design idea is rhythm, which in a building dedicated to music is not a gratuitous metaphor. The works are held in two large transparent envelopes of extra-clear glass, one 24 meters long and one seven meters long, hung on the wall of Roman bricks that lines the wall. The pieces are not lined up on horizontal shelves as in 19th-century museums. They are placed at different heights and different depths, in a tight sequence that forces the eye to go up, go down, come closer, step back. It is a score, and it is explicitly designed as one.

The practical effect, for visitors, is twofold. On one hand the reading is more tiring than with a traditional display case: you have to look for the pieces, you don't find them all at the same eye level, and small children see well only the low band. On the other hand each object gains air around itself and is read in isolation, without the storeroom confusion that afflicts so many Italian archaeological museums. It is the preferable solution, even if some find it snobbish.

The 11 cylindrical cases and the ancient Roman wall

The second device is even more beautiful. 11 cylindrical glass cases are arranged along the axis of an ancient Roman wall that runs under the floor of the hall. The designers called it a small archaeological forest, and the image is exact: you walk among glass columns that rise from the floor, each with an object inside, and their row is not random but follows the buried trace of an ancient masonry. The visitor who doesn't know this passes and sees 11 cylinders. Whoever knows walks over a 2,000-year-old wall and reads it through the glass. It is a detail that almost nobody notices on entering.

Materials, light and finishes of the Sala del Peduncolo

The materials of the layout are three, and they dialogue with Renzo Piano's architecture instead of fighting it: Roman bricks for the back wall, travertine for the floor, wood for the false ceiling, extra-clear glass for the cases. Extra-clear glass, the low-iron kind, has an almost neutral color rendering and doesn't tint pale profiles green. On a red-figure ceramic, where the difference between the orange of the clay and the black of the slip is everything, the choice matters. The lighting supply is from Zumtobel and Guzzini, the cases and the layout from S.A.C. Srl, the systems design by engineer Mario Semproni, the building works by Baglioni Srl.

The visit to the Museo Aristaios, piece by piece

What follows is the route in the chronological order of the productions, which is also what the layout supports. Don't expect endless captions on the labels: here it's best to arrive prepared, and this is precisely the reason it's worth reading first.

The Cycladic marble vase, the oldest piece

The oldest find in the collection is a marble vase of Cycladic production, datable between 3200 and 2700 BC. We are in the Early Cycladic, in the Aegean archipelago, 1,500 years before Homer and 2,500 before the Parthenon. The Cyclades at that moment produce those female figurines of white marble with crossed arms that drove Brancusi, Modigliani and Moore wild, and they also produce marble vessels: cups, plates, bowls, obtained by abrasion from a solid block, without a lathe and without hard metal, working with emery and sand. Look at it against the light and look for the working marks. The marble of the Cyclades, that of Paros and Naxos, has a grain that at thin thickness lets light through.

An object like this required weeks of work to produce, and served to hold very little. It is the clearest sign that it is a prestige good, not a utensil. In the collection it acts as a threshold: here everything begins.

The Minoan and Mycenaean ceramics of the Museo Aristaios

The next step is the Aegean Bronze Age. Minoan ceramics is that of Crete, of the palaces of Knossos, Phaistos, Malia and Zakros, and has a characteristic recognizable at a glance: naturalistic decoration. Octopuses, seaweed, lilies, dolphins, spirals that coil without ever closing into a grid. The Minoans painted the sea as they saw it, with a freedom that rarely returns in ancient art. The Kamares style, with light decoration on a dark ground, and the so-called marine style of Late Minoan I are the two peaks.

Mycenaean ceramics, which succeeds it on the Greek mainland between the 16th and 12th centuries BC, is something else entirely: stiffer, more repetitive, more bureaucratic. The same marine motifs become patterns. It's not a value judgment, it's a difference of civilization: the Mycenaean palaces were administrative fortresses with archives in Linear B, and produced serial pottery for export, with the stirrup jar and the alabastron found identical from Cyprus to Sicily. The visitor who knows this, in front of two apparently similar vases, understands that they have crossed the collapse of a world.

The Geometric at the Museo Aristaios: when Greece starts over

Between 1100 and 700 BC Greece goes through what the textbooks used to call the Hellenic Middle Ages: collapse of the palaces, disappearance of writing, depopulation. When ceramics re-emerges, it has lost the octopuses and gained geometry. Meanders, zigzags, triangles, concentric circles drawn with a multiple compass, overlapping bands covering the entire body of the vase. The human figure re-enters late, toward the eighth century, and re-enters reduced to a sign: a triangle for the chest, sticks for the arms, a dot for the head with a point for the muzzle.

In Athens, in that century, the great funerary vases of the Dipylon are produced, almost two meters tall, with scenes of prothesis, that is, the laying out of the deceased on the funeral bed, and of ekphorà, the transport to the tomb. The Sinopoli collection has no Dipylon krater, and couldn't have: those are museum pieces for big institutions. It does have, however, the vocabulary of the Geometric, and it serves for reading the rest.

Corinth and the miniature: the seventh century BC at the Museo Aristaios

In the seventh century BC primacy passes to Corinth, which thanks to its position on the isthmus controls traffic between the Aegean and the West. Corinthian ceramics invents two things destined to make history. The first is the Orientalizing repertoire: lions, panthers, sphinxes, sirens, griffins, the fauna that merchants had seen on Syrian and Phoenician textiles and ivories, distributed on overlapping friezes with rosettes filling every empty space. The second is the black-figure technique: the dark silhouette on the pale ground of the clay, with the inner details obtained by incision, that is, scratching the slip with a point before firing, and with touches of red and white added.

Corinth exports above all small containers for ointments and perfumes: the globular aryballos, the tapered alabastron, the pyxis with lid. They are objects worth a few cents at the time, produced by the tens of thousands, found in the tombs of half the Mediterranean, Etruria included. At the Museo Aristaios these miniatures should be looked at calmly and, if you have long sight, count the legs: in the serial Corinthian friezes it happens that the painter, in a hurry, skips one.

Laconia, East Greece and the other schools

The collection also documents two productions that the general public ignores entirely. Laconian ceramics, that is, Spartan, of the sixth century BC, is one of the surprises of Greek archaeology: Sparta, which the imagination wants as a barracks without art, produced black-figure cups of very high finesse, often with an inner round frieze occupying the bottom of the kylix. The Hunt Painter and the Rider Painter are conventional names of Laconian vase painters whose wares reached as far as Cyrene and Etruria.

East Greek ceramics is that of the Ionian cities of the Asia Minor coast and the nearby islands, Miletus, Samos, Chios, Rhodes, Clazomenae. Lighter colors, pale clays, animals drawn with a soft line, and the famous eye cups, with two big apotropaic eyes painted under the handles. Whoever drank, raising the cup, covered their face and showed the other diners two wide-open eyes. It is one of the few visual jokes that antiquity has left us intact.

The Attic black figures of the Museo Aristaios: Lydos

From here on you enter the central part of the collection, the one that justifies all the others. Between the end of the seventh century and the middle of the sixth, Athens supplants Corinth and conquers the Mediterranean market for fine ceramics. Attic clay, rich in iron, fires to a warm, deep orange. Attic black slip has a metallic luster that nobody ever managed to imitate completely.

Lydos is one of the major names of the period, active around the middle of the sixth century BC. The name is the one he himself signed on some vases: ho Lydos, the Lydian, that is, the man who came from Lydia. A vase painter of foreign origin, perhaps the son of immigrants or a freed slave, who works in the Kerameikos of Athens and signs with the ethnic instead of a personal name. His drawing is powerful, a little rough, with broad figures and wide gestures. His recognized masterpiece is the krater with the Gigantomachy of the Acropolis. The works by Lydos in the collection are among the pieces of greatest scientific weight in the Museo Aristaios.

The Lysippides Painter and the bilingual amphorae

The Lysippides Painter, active in the last decades of the sixth century BC, takes his conventional name from the inscription Lysippides kalos, that is, Lysippides is beautiful, which appears on some of his vases. These acclamations of beauty, the kalos names, are a formidable dating tool: they name real young Athenian aristocrats, and when the name can be cross-checked with historical sources you get a range of years.

The Lysippides Painter is of interest mainly for one reason. His activity is intertwined with that of the Andokides Painter, the artist to whom the invention of the red-figure technique around 530 BC is attributed. There is a group of vases called bilingual, with the same subject painted on one side in black figure and on the other in red figure: on one side the old language, on the other the new, on the same piece. Scholars have debated for a century if the Lysippides Painter and the Andokides Painter are two distinct hands or the same person experimenting with two techniques. It is one of the great open questions of Attic vase painting and it should be stated as a hypothesis, because that is what it remains.

The circle of Nikosthenes and the amphorae made for Etruria

Nikosthenes, or Nicostene in the Italianized form, was not a painter but a potter, that is, the owner of the workshop, active in Athens between about 545 and 510 BC. He signed as potter more than 120 vases, an enormous number. His workshop produced a type of amphora so characteristic that it is called the Nikosthenic amphora: body with a sharp profile, angular shoulder, very wide and flat ribbon handles. The extraordinary thing is that this shape is not Greek. It derives from Etruscan bucchero amphorae, and the Nikosthenic pieces have been found almost all at Cerveteri.

That is, Nikosthenes studied the taste of his Etruscan clients and produced to measure for them, in Greece, in series, for export. It is the first documented case of design oriented to the foreign market in the history of European ceramics, and it's worth pausing a moment in front of the display case: what looks like a Greek vase is a product conceived for an aristocrat of Caere who wanted an Athenian object of familiar shape.

The red figures of the Museo Aristaios: the Syleus Painter

Around 530 BC someone in Athens reverses the procedure. Instead of painting the figures in black on the pale ground, the ground is filled with black slip and the figures are left in the color of the clay. The advantage is enormous: the inner details no longer have to be incised with the point but drawn with a brush, with a line that can thicken, thin, curve. Greek ceramics gains chiaroscuro, the twisting of bodies, drapery, foreshortening.

The Syleus Painter is an Attic vase painter of the Severe style, active in the first decades of the fifth century BC, roughly between 500 and 470. The conventional name comes from a pelike with the episode of Syleus, the brigand of Lydia who forced travelers to hoe his vineyard and whom Heracles killed with his own hoe. His drawing is crisp, with solid bodies and profile faces with a pronounced chin: the phase in which the Greek painter has just learned foreshortening and shows it off with the pride of someone holding a new technique in his hands.

The Eretria Painter and the taste of the late fifth century

The Eretria Painter works two generations later, in the second half of the fifth century BC, roughly between 440 and 420, in the years of the Peloponnesian War. He takes his name from a lekythos found at Eretria, in Euboea. The world he paints is completely different: no more heroes smashing heads, but scenes of the women's quarters, women dressing, Eros fluttering about, weddings, domestic tenderness. The garments are transparent and fall in very dense folds, the bodies have lengthened.

The distance between the Syleus Painter and the Eretria Painter, two display cases a few meters apart in the Museo Aristaios, measures 60 years of Greek history: from the victory over the Persians to the age of Pericles, from the display of strength to the search for grace. If I had to point out a single thing to look at in this museum, I would point out this pair. It is worth the trip.

The Italiot and Apulian ceramics of the Museo Aristaios

From the second half of the fifth century BC the Greek colonies of the West stop importing vases from Athens and begin to produce their own. The Italiot workshops are born, distinguished by area: Lucanian, Apulian, Campanian, Paestan, Sicilian. Apulian production, centered on Taranto, is the most abundant and the most theatrical. The vases grow in size up to monumental kraters over a meter tall, decoration invades every surface, the naiskoi appear, that is, the little funerary shrines with the heroized deceased inside, and scenes of tragedy with the characters arranged on several registers as on a stage.

The taste is different from the Attic and should be judged by its own criteria. Whoever comes from Athenian vases finds Apulian ceramics overloaded. Whoever looks at it for what it is, that is, an indigenous funerary language translated into Greek forms, finds a world in it. The collection documents the passage, and it is one of its merits: it doesn't stop at canonical Greece.

Daunia, the Italy that paints for itself

Then there is a chapter that most museums lack entirely: the indigenous ceramics of Daunia, that is, northern Apulia, the Tavoliere, the area between Foggia, Canosa and the Gargano. The Daunians were not Greek and did not copy the Greeks. They made by hand, without a fast wheel, vases of pale clay decorated with bands and geometric motifs in brown and red, with shapes that don't exist in Greece: zoomorphic askoi, ollae with very tall ribbon handles, the famous Daunian krater with protomes.

They are objects that look modern and are actually 2,500 years old. The fact that Sinopoli bought them, when he could have bought something else, says a lot about his eye. A parlor collector would have filled the display cases with Attic and that's it. He wanted the periphery, what archaeologists call Daunian sub-Geometric, and he was right.

Etruscan bronzes, bucchero and Magna Graecia vessels

Alongside the ceramics the museum displays bronze vessels of Etruscan and Magna Graecia production. Ancient bronze doesn't reach us looking as it did: what you see green or brown was, when it was made, yellow and shiny like pale gold, polished to a mirror. The shapes are those of the banquet: jugs, situlae, strainers, paterae. The Etruscan workshops of Vulci exported bronze jugs across the Mediterranean, and some have been found in Greece, which overturns the commonplace of the Etruscans as sole importers.

Bucchero deserves a chapter of its own and you'll find it a little further on. Here it is enough to say that the collection includes specimens of that glossy black ceramic which is the Etruscan invention par excellence.

The votive statuettes of the Museo Aristaios

A conspicuous series of statuettes, largely votive, depicts deities, worshippers and animals. These are the so-called ex votos, the objects left in sanctuaries to accompany a request or to give thanks for a favor received. They cost little, were bought at the stalls in front of the sanctuary, and were produced in series from molds. Precisely for this reason they tell of the real religiosity of ordinary people, which the great marble temples don't tell at all.

The animal figurines, in particular, deserve a stop. Oxen, horses, birds, rams. Whoever offered a terracotta ox was symbolically offering a real ox they couldn't afford. It is one of the oldest and most universal religious economies known, and it still works, with other materials, in today's sanctuaries.

The bizarre pieces: the painted cube and the feeding bottle

In every serious collection there is something nobody can explain, and the Museo Aristaios is no exception. The first piece is a cube of painted terracotta with concave sides, of uncertain use: perhaps a children's game, perhaps a ritual object, perhaps a piece of furnishing. Nobody knows for sure, and the official sources say so openly.

The second is a small jug of coarse paste with a spout, which could be a poppatoio, that is, the baby bottle of antiquity. If the identification holds, and it remains a hypothesis, we are in front of one of the most moving objects archaeology produces: a container made so that a mother could give a newborn something to drink 3,000 years ago. There are similar specimens in several museums, often found in infant tombs, and it is the kind of find in front of which groups stop chatting.

Our advice: look for these two objects before the masterpieces. They are among the others, they have no bigger label, and they are the reason it's worth having a private collection instead of a ministerial selection.

Vase painting explained to those who know nothing about it

This is the chapter that makes the visit useful even to those who enter the Museo Aristaios with no preparation at all. 10 minutes of reading and the vases stop being vases: they become readable documents.

Why the Greeks painted vases

First thing, and the most counterintuitive: painted ceramics was not museum art. It was everyday tableware, as expensive as good crockery but not as a piece of jewelry. It served for drinking, for pouring, for storing oil and wine, for carrying water, for holding perfumes, for accompanying the dead into the tomb. The prices we know from the commercial inscriptions scratched under the feet of vases are modest. What today we put under glass and light with museum lighting was, for an Athenian of the fifth century, a good-quality table service.

Second thing: the overwhelming majority of the Attic vases we admire in European museums was not found in Greece. It was found in Etruria, in the tombs of Vulci, Cerveteri, Tarquinia, Chiusi. Etruscan aristocrats bought Greek vases by the cartload and took them to the grave with them. Without that Etruscan funerary fashion we would have almost nothing of Greek vase painting, because in Greece vases broke and ended up in dumps. It is one of the loveliest paradoxes of classical archaeology: we know Greek painting thanks to the tastes of their competitors in the Tyrrhenian.

The clay, the wheel and the paint that is not paint

The vase is thrown on the fast wheel, in several pieces that are then joined with slip: body, neck, foot, handles. It is left to dry until the consistency called leather-hard, then it is decorated. The so-called black paint is not paint and contains no black pigments. It is clay, the same clay as the vase, refined until it becomes a suspension of very fine particles, applied with a brush. The difference between the body and the decoration, before firing, is barely visible.

The black is born in the kiln, and it is born from a three-phase process that Greek potters mastered without the slightest idea of the chemistry involved. First phase, oxidizing: it is fired with plenty of oxygen at around 800 degrees, and the whole vase turns red, because the iron in the clay oxidizes into hematite. Second phase, reducing: the air vents are closed and green wood or damp sawdust is thrown in, the temperature rises toward 950 degrees, oxygen is lacking, and the whole vase turns black because the iron is reduced to magnetite. Third phase, oxidizing again: the vents are reopened and the temperature is lowered. Here the miracle happens. The body of the vase, porous, breathes and goes back to red. The film of refined clay, which in the reducing phase has vitrified and sintered, no longer lets oxygen through and stays black forever.

Put differently: Greeks and Romans obtained two colors from a single material, controlling only the air of the kiln. No later ceramic technology, up to porcelain, has equaled the brilliance of that black. And every time you find yourself in front of a display case at the Museo Aristaios, think that that gloss is not enamel: it is well-fired clay.

The black figures

The black-figure technique was born in Corinth around 700 BC and Athens adopted and perfected it in the sixth century. The painter lays out the silhouette of the figure with black slip, and then incises the inner details with a metal point, cutting the black film until the red clay beneath is uncovered. Muscles, folds of garments, locks of hair, horses' manes: everything is incised. Touches of white are then added, reserved by convention for female skin, and of purplish red for beards, cloaks and harnesses.

The limit of the technique is evident as soon as you know it: incision produces a line of constant thickness, which doesn't modulate. A black figure is a silhouette with a lattice of scratches inside. It works very well for crowded scenes, processions, combats. It works badly for twisting bodies and for foreshortening. The advantage is that, read from a distance, the black figure is crystal clear: if you have to recognize a vase in a dark display case at the other end of a room, black figure wins.

The red figures

Around 530 BC, in Athens, someone inverts the relationship. The ground is painted black and the figures are left in reserve, that is, in the natural color of the clay. The inner details are drawn with a brush, and this is the point: the brush modulates. The relief line is born, that thread of black clay slightly raised, probably applied with a syringe made of bristle and a bladder, which you can feel by touch and which is the technical signature of high-level Attic vase painting. Dilution is born, that is, slip thinned with water, which in firing gives a golden brown used for muscles and soft hair.

The invention is attributed by convention to the Andokides Painter, and the date around 530 BC is widely accepted. Within a generation the new technique sweeps away the old one for fine vessels, while black figures survive until the second century BC for a single type of object: the Panathenaic amphorae, the prize vases of the Athenian games, which remained black-figure for ritual reasons. It is a magnificent case of religious conservatism: nobody dreamed of modernizing the trophy.

Why painters are called Painter of Something

It's a frequent question, and an intelligent one. Only a small part of Greek vase painters signed. For all the others, scholarship has built over the last century a system of attribution based on the recurring and involuntary detail: the way of rendering the ear, the ankle, the collarbone, the fold of the cloak above the elbow. The method was systematically developed by John Davidson Beazley between the 1910s and the 1960s, cataloging tens of thousands of vases and isolating hundreds of individual hands.

Each anonymous hand is given a conventional name, drawn from the most famous subject, from the place of discovery, from the museum that holds the eponymous piece or from the name that appears in a painted acclamation. Hence the Syleus Painter, who takes his name from the episode of Syleus, the Eretria Painter, from the place of discovery, the Lysippides Painter, from the inscription of beauty. They are not colorful nicknames. They are scientific labels, and behind each one there is a real person who worked, breathed the dust of the workshop and took a wage.

The shapes of vases and what they were for

Last tool, and then the display case reads itself. The names of the shapes are Greek, and each had a precise function.

The krater is the wine vase. Large, open, bellied, it served to mix wine and water at the center of the symposium room: the Greeks drank wine diluted, normally one part wine to three of water, and whoever drank it neat was considered a barbarian or a drunk. There are four main types: column, volute, calyx and bell. The krater is the showpiece par excellence, the largest and most decorated, the one on which the painter staked his reputation.

The amphora is the container for storage and transport, with two vertical handles. In the fine version it was used for quality oil and wine and as a ceremonial gift. The hydria, with three handles, two horizontal for lifting and one vertical for pouring, was the water vase, carried on the head by women from the fountain to the house. The oinochoe is the wine jug, with a trefoil mouth for pouring without dripping. The kantharos, tall and with two vertical handles above the rim, is the cup of Dionysus.

The kylix is the symposium cup, low and wide on a tall foot, with the decorated inner tondo that was uncovered little by little as one drank. The lekythos, slender and with a narrow neck, held perfumed oil and became the funerary vase par excellence. The white-ground lekythoi, with scenes of visits to the tomb, are among the most delicate things Greek art produced. The alabastron and the aryballos, tiny, held ointments. The pelike is an amphora with a heavy, low body. The pyxis is the box with a lid for jewels and cosmetics. The askos, from the Greek for wineskin, is a low, flattened container for oil, and in the indigenous Italic area it often takes animal forms.

Learn five of these names and the display case changes meaning. You're no longer looking at vases. You're looking at the table, the cellar, the bathroom and the funeral of a Greek house.

The kraters and amphorae of the Museo Aristaios: what to look for

If you have little time, the big pieces are the kraters and the amphorae, and not for the size alone. They are the shapes on which vase painters truly applied themselves, the ones that tell articulated myths instead of single isolated figures.

How to read a krater

A well-preserved krater has two sides and you have to look at both, which seems obvious and in display cases never is: side A, the main one, carries the important scene, often mythological. Side B, which painters dispatched more quickly, usually carries three cloaked youths in conversation, a kind of filler formula repeated on thousands of vases. If in a display case you see side B, move. Under the handles there usually run palmettes and scrolls, on the rim a band of ovolo or ivy, above the foot a braid or a meander.

The recurring subjects are few and recognizable. Dionysus with the thyrsus, the ivy crown and the retinue of satyrs and maenads. Heracles with the lion skin and the club. Theseus against the Minotaur. Scenes of the warrior's departure, with the woman handing him the cup. Amazonomachies and centauromachies. The amorous pursuits of the gods, which modern taste reads with embarrassment and which were a codified genre. On Apulian vases, in addition, the funerary naiskoi and the theatrical scenes of the phlyakes, with pot-bellied masked actors on a wooden stage.

The amphorae and the secret under the foot

On the amphorae there is a detail almost nobody looks at because it is invisible in the display case: under the foot, many exported Attic vases carry commercial graffiti, marks and numbers incised by merchants to indicate the contents of the lot and the price. They are the bookkeeping of ancient trade, and they can be read on hundreds of specimens. In museums almost nobody displays the underside of vases, and one of the most concrete aspects of Greek economic history is lost. When in a display case you find a vase mounted on a support that lets you glimpse the foot, step closer.

Etruscan bucchero, the most radical invention of ancient Italy

Bucchero is black ceramic throughout its thickness. Not black on the surface: black down to the center of the wall. It is obtained by firing in a strongly reducing atmosphere, that is, with the kiln closed and saturated with smoke, so that the iron contained in the clay stays in a reduced state throughout the mass. Then it is burnished with a stick, before firing, until a reflecting surface is obtained.

It was born at Cerveteri around 675 BC and for a century and a half it is the distinctive sign of Etruscan ceramics. Scholars divide it into three phases. Thin bucchero, from about 675 to 600 BC, with walls of two or three millimeters, slender and crisp shapes, incised fan or roulette decoration: it is the technical peak, and even today potters struggle to replicate it. Transitional bucchero, during the sixth century. Heavy bucchero, from about 575 to 480 BC, produced above all at Chiusi and in inland Etruria, with thick walls, relief decoration obtained by molding and monumental shapes.

The question to ask is: why black? The most accredited answer is that bucchero imitated metal vessels, burnished bronze and perhaps blackened silver, that is, the table service of the very rich. An Etruscan family of middle rank could afford bucchero and cut a good figure at the banquet. It is ceramics pretending to be metal, and it is one of the most modern ideas antiquity had.

Bucchero was exported, and quite a lot: it is found in Carthage, in Provence, in Greece, in Egypt. And it is precisely the shape of the bucchero amphorae that, as we saw, Nikosthenes copied in Athens to sell it to the Etruscans. A perfect commercial circle, and an excellent argument against the idea of a passive and provincial Etruria.

Anyone who gets passionate about this production has, 20 minutes from the Museo Aristaios, the right place to go deeper: the Museo Etrusco di Villa Giulia, which is the national museum of Etruscan art. In the same city you can continue with the Museum of Etruscan and Italic Antiquities of the Sapienza.

Renzo Piano's Auditorium Parco della Musica, the container

You can't understand the Museo Aristaios without understanding the building that houses it, and the building deserves half an hour of attention in its own right.

The 1993 competition and the three beetles of the Auditorium

Renzo Piano won the invitation-only competition announced in 1993 for Rome's new music complex. The project occupies an area of about 55,000 square meters between Viale Pietro de Coubertin and Viale Tiziano, on the edge of the 1960 Olympic Village. The formal solution is that of three separate volumes, each an autonomous concert hall, arranged around a sloping piazza that is also an open-air cavea. Romans christened them right away beetles, or turtles, or soundboxes depending on mood, because of the domed shell clad on the outside with lead strips laid like scales. The bases of the buildings are in brick.

The separation of the three volumes is not a whim. It serves to cancel acoustic interference between one hall and another, so that you can play Mahler in one and Bach in the other without the two being heard together. Each hall rests on anti-vibration supports and has an independent structure. It is the kind of solution that costs a great deal and that the public never sees.

The three halls and the Cavea

The Sala Sinopoli was the first to be inaugurated, on April 21, 2002, the day of Rome's birthday, and has about 1,130 seats. The Sala Petrassi, named after the composer Goffredo Petrassi, has just under 700. The Sala Santa Cecilia, the big one, with about 2,750 seats, opened on December 21, 2002 and completed the complex. Its interior is lined with 26 shells of American cherry wood suspended above the stalls, which can be oriented to change the reverberation times: wood because wood is the material of string instruments, and the logic is that of playing inside an instrument.

The Cavea, the open-air piazza-amphitheater between the three volumes, holds about 3,000 spectators and in summer becomes one of the most frequented places in the city. In 2020 the Rome City Council approved naming the complex after Ennio Morricone, who died that year. Since then the full name has been Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone. Anyone who wants the complete history of the complex, the programs and the seasons, will find it on the page dedicated to the Auditorium Parco della Musica.

An observation, and not a tender one. The Auditorium works very well as a cultural machine and badly as an urban place: it is an island surrounded by fast-flowing avenues, and the neighborhood around it almost never crosses it. The consequence for our museum is direct: the Museo Aristaios has no spontaneous foot traffic. Whoever comes is looking for it. And that is why, on any Saturday afternoon, you will have the display cases all to yourself.

The Auditorium's Roman villa and the Archaeological Museum

The second museum, the one almost everyone discovers by chance while looking for the first, tells the story of what was under the construction site.

The excavation of the Auditorium, 1995-1998

The construction works of the Auditorium started in 1995 and were followed from the beginning by the Office of Ancient Monuments and Excavations of the municipal Superintendency, in agreement with the Archaeological Superintendency of Rome. What emerged between 1995 and 1998 was a building of over 2,000 square meters with a sequence of continuous occupation from the middle of the sixth century BC to the imperial age, articulated by the excavators into six periods. The discovery forced a revision of the project and delayed the works by years, which at the time enraged half the city. With hindsight it was the best thing that could have happened: without that delay, today there would be no visible archaeological area.

The phases of the Auditorium's Roman villa

The first installation is a rustic farm of the Archaic age, destroyed around 500 BC. On its ruins, in that same period, a large manor villa rose associated with a walled village, probably intended for the servants employed in agricultural work. It is a datum of enormous interest for the history of the Roman countryside: it shows that the countryside three kilometers from the walls, already in the fifth century BC, was organized in farm estates with resident labor, and not in a dust of small holdings as the vulgate on the early peasant Romans would have it. The later phases run to the beginning of the third century AD, when the complex is abandoned.

The oil press and the tile with Achelous

Two finds carry the display on their own. The first is the cast of the base of the oil press, the torcular, found among the remains of the large villa set up around 500 BC. It certifies that olives were grown here and oil produced at an estate scale, at a time when historians were still debating how widespread olive growing was in Archaic Latium. A block of stone with a drainage channel is worth, in this case, 10 pages of treatise.

The second is the large eaves tile with the head of Achelous, inserted in the roof of the manor area during a renovation around 300 BC. Achelous is the river deity par excellence of the Greek world, the river that wrestled with Heracles for the hand of Deianira by turning into a snake and a bull, and that lost a horn. That horn, according to one of the versions, became the cornucopia. In ancient art he has a bearded human face and bull's horns. Finding his face on the eaves of a villa in the Roman countryside means that the owners knew the Greek repertoire and used it to mark their own rank. It is a small detail with large consequences.

The layout of the Archaeological Museum

The museum occupies two rooms. In the first, the life phases of the complex are illustrated with wooden models, reconstruction drawings and a large scale model. Four display cases gather selected materials, cult furnishings and kitchen and table pottery. Two cases house reconstructions of specific contexts, including a hearth for baking bread and a pantry. The second room widens the view to the territory between the Aurelian Walls, the Aniene and the Tiber, with panels, photographs and three-dimensional reconstructions. From a terrace you see a wall in opus reticulatum.

The chosen formula is called in situ musealization: the objects stay where they were found and are looked at by leaning over the remains. It is the most difficult and most honest museum solution there is, and it is the reason it's best to visit the two museums in the same round. The Museo Aristaios tells Greece with objects that arrived in Rome in the 20th century. The Archaeological Museum tells Rome with objects that never moved. The official page is on the website of the Capitoline Superintendency, and the visiting page on auditorium.com.

How to really visit the Museo Aristaios

How much time you need for the Museo Aristaios

For the Museo Aristaios alone, 40 minutes is the right measure for an attentive visit. 20 are enough for a quick pass. Add another 30 or 40 minutes for the Archaeological Museum and the Roman villa. In all, an hour and a half. With a guide who tells you about the pieces you easily reach two hours, and it bores nobody, because the pieces are few enough to be looked at one by one.

A piece of advice on method: don't try to read everything. In a museum of 161 pieces the temptation to read every label is strong and produces, after 30 minutes, the classic saturation. Pick eight objects and really look at them, three minutes each. It is the best way to visit any museum and here it works very well.

When to go to the Museo Aristaios and when to avoid it

Opening is concentrated on weekends, so the choice is between Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday morning, just after opening, the Auditorium is almost empty and the museum is yours. On Sunday afternoon, in season, the complex fills with concert audiences and family activities, and the passage becomes noisy. Avoid days of big events that occupy the common spaces: when the Auditorium hosts book fairs, festivals, trade shows or television productions, the exhibition rooms may be closed or made inaccessible. A phone call before leaving settles the question in 30 seconds.

The best period, by personal taste, is autumn. From October on the Cavea empties, the park around the three volumes takes on the right colors, and an October Saturday afternoon in this museum is one of the most civilized things you can do in Rome for free.

The Museo Aristaios with children

It works better than you'd expect, on two conditions. The first is height: the display cases play on heights, and under 1.2 meters only the lower band is seen well. Bring the patience to lift the youngest, or aim straight for the 11 cylindrical cases, which are readable even from low down. The second condition is having a story to tell. Greek vases are figurative and narrative: if in front of an amphora you ask a child to find Heracles's lion or Poseidon's trident, the visit becomes a treasure hunt.

The terracotta cube that was perhaps a game and the small jug that was perhaps a baby bottle are the two pieces that always work with children, because they speak of ancient childhood. Anyone looking for an activity entirely designed for the youngest finds, a few stops away, Explora, the children's museum of Rome, on Via Flaminia.

Accessibility of the Museo Aristaios

The Auditorium is a recent building, designed with accessibility criteria: level routes, elevators, equipped restrooms, underground parking with reserved spaces. The museum's rooms are on the same level as the interior routes. For specific needs, and to know if at the time of your visit there are construction sites or detours, the number to call is 06 80241281.

Photographs, coat check, services

Photographs without flash and without a tripod are normally allowed, as in almost all Italian museums after the liberalization of filming in places of culture. The staff in the room remain the authority on the matter and it's best to ask. Flash, in any case, is useless on a display case: it only produces a white flash at the center of the image. The Auditorium has a cafe, a bookshop and restrooms along the common route. Coat check and storage are tied to the events on the program and not to the museum.

How to get to the Museo Aristaios

The address to give anyone is Viale Pietro de Coubertin 30, Flaminio neighborhood. From the historic center there are three options.

By metro and tram: line A to Flaminio station, exit Piazzale Flaminio, and from there line 2 toward Piazza Mancini, stop Apollodoro. Line 2 is a tram line, but because of work on Viale delle Belle Arti the service is handled by replacement buses on the same route. The travel times stay at 10 or 12 minutes from the terminus. The service in force is published by Roma Servizi per la Mobilità and by ATAC.

By direct bus: line 910 connects Termini to Piazza Mancini via Via Nomentana, Villa Borghese and Viale Tiziano. The 53 runs from Largo Chigi to Piazza Mancini. The 168 connects Tiburtina station to Largo Maresciallo Diaz. The 982 passes along Viale XVII Olimpiade. The useful stops are Piazza Apollodoro and Piazza Mancini, both a few minutes' walk from the entrance.

By car: the Auditorium has a paid underground parking lot with about a thousand spaces, accessible from Viale Pietro de Coubertin. It is one of the rare Roman occasions when arriving by car is not a mistake, especially on Sunday morning. Anyone coming from northern Rome has the Roma-Viterbo regional railway with the Euclide stop, about 10 minutes on foot away.

Last possibility, the recommended one: on foot from Piazza del Popolo along Via Flaminia, then Viale Tiziano. It is about two and a half kilometers, 35 minutes at a relaxed pace, and you cross an early-20th-century Rome that no tourist itinerary contemplates.

The Flaminio neighborhood around the Museo Aristaios

Flaminio is one of the most interesting neighborhoods in Rome and one of the least visited. It was born as an extra-urban area along Via Flaminia, the consular road opened by the censor Gaius Flaminius in 220 BC to connect Rome to Rimini. It stays countryside and vineyards until the 19th century. It urbanizes in the 20th century in two waves, the one of the 1930s and the Olympic one of 1960. Today it is a concentration of contemporary architecture like few other European neighborhoods.

The MAXXI, five minutes from the Museo Aristaios

The National Museum of 21st-century Arts occupies on Via Guido Reni the buildings of a former barracks, redesigned by Zaha Hadid, a British-Iraqi architect whose project was chosen from among 273 proposals from all over the world. The museum opened in 2010 and occupies about 29,000 square meters. The official website lists opening Tuesday to Sunday from 11:00 to 19:00, closed Monday, and a full ticket of €15, reduced €12, with lower rates when buying online. Entry is free for those under 18. The complete page is at the MAXXI entry, and the visiting information is updated on maxxi.art.

The pairing of the two museums is one of those worth a day: in the morning sixth-century BC Greek ceramics, in the afternoon 21st-century art and architecture, 400 meters apart, in two buildings signed by two of the major names of contemporary architecture. Few cities can afford a combination like that, and Rome doesn't advertise it at all.

The Palazzetto dello Sport in Piazza Apollodoro

At the stop where you get off, in Piazza Apollodoro, rises one of the most important structures of 20th-century Italian engineering. The Palazzetto dello Sport was built between July 1956 and September 1957 to a design by the architect Annibale Vitellozzi and the engineer Pier Luigi Nervi. The dome, entirely of prefabricated reinforced concrete in wedge-shaped modules, has an outer diameter of about 78 meters and is supported on the outside by 36 Y-shaped buttresses arranged along the perimeter. It hosted the basketball and weightlifting competitions of the 1960 Olympics and was the first Roman Olympic facility to be completed. Restored starting in 2022, it reopened in October 2023.

Stop for 30 seconds under the buttresses and look up. Nervi calculated these structures with paper and slide rule, without computers, and obtained roofs that are built today with finite element analysis software. He worked with ferrocement and prefabrication like nobody before and few after him.

The Stadio Flaminio and the Olympic Village

A little further, on Viale dello Stadio Flaminio, is the other Nervi masterpiece in the area: the Stadio Flaminio, built between 1957 and 1959 to a design by Pier Luigi Nervi and his son Antonio, for about 50,000 spectators, with reinforced concrete frames and prefabricated stands. Under the grandstands there was room for a swimming pool and five gyms. It hosted the football matches of the 1960 Games and, for years, the Italian national rugby team's matches. Today it is disused and awaits a fate: the declaration of cultural interest of 2018 and a conservation plan drawn up by 2020 with the support of the Getty Foundation have finally affirmed its value. Seeing it closed, behind the fences, is one of the architectural sorrows of this city.

All around extends the Olympic Village, the neighborhood built in 1958-1960 to house the athletes to a design by a group that included Adalberto Libera, Vittorio Cafiero, Amedeo Luccichenti, Vincenzo Monaco and Luigi Moretti: small apartment buildings on pilotis, continuous green space, Nervi's Corso Francia viaduct crossing it. It is one of the few Italian public-housing neighborhoods that has aged well. Anyone who wants to complete the picture of Roman sports architecture has, on the other bank of the Tiber, the Foro Italico with the Stadio Olimpico.

What else is there 20 minutes from the Museo Aristaios

To the north, a short walk away, the Tiber and Milvian Bridge, the bridge of the 312 battle between Constantine and Maxentius, with Valadier's little tower and a neighborhood of venues that fills up in the evening. To the south, along Viale delle Belle Arti, the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna and the Museo Etrusco di Villa Giulia, which is the natural continuation of this ceramic itinerary. A little further begins Villa Borghese, with the Bioparco.

Anyone who wants to stay on the theme of music and objects has in the city the National Museum of Musical Instruments at Santa Croce in Gerusalemme and the MUSA, the musical instruments museum of the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia. Anyone who wants to stay on archaeology finds at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme and at Palazzo Altemps two venues of the Museo Nazionale Romano, and at the Crypta Balbi the story of the changing city. For the relationship between archaeology and industrial archaeology, the Centrale Montemartini remains the most successful experiment.

A curiosity about the Museo Aristaios - Auditorium Parco della Musica - Sinopoli Collection

The curiosity lies in a coincidence that almost nobody notices, and that once noticed is never forgotten. In the same complex of buildings coexist a concert hall named after Giuseppe Sinopoli and the museum that displays the archaeological collection of Giuseppe Sinopoli. The Sala Sinopoli was inaugurated on April 21, 2002, just under a year after the conductor's death, which took place in Berlin on April 20, 2001. The museum with its vases arrived 10 years later, in December 2012, when the Ministry designated to this site the 161 pieces bought in 2010 from the heirs. Neither fact was planned in relation to the other. The result is that in Rome there exists a building in which one man is remembered twice for two different trades, 50 meters apart, and it is written nowhere.

There is more, and it concerns the name on the sign. Aristaios was not invented for the museum. It was the title of the scientific catalog of the collection, published by Marsilio in Venice in 1995, 460 pages and over 500 illustrations, edited by Enrico Paribeni, one of the major Italian archaeologists of the last century and a specialist in Greek ceramics. In that volume the pieces cataloged were 120. The core bought by the State and now on display numbers 161. The museum, put another way, carries the title of a book published 17 years before the museum existed. Sinopoli was alive, he was 49, and he himself had chosen the name of the farmer god.

I'll add a detail that to me seems the most beautiful thing of all. Aristaeus, in Virgil's Georgics, is the man who loses everything, goes underwater to question his mother, seizes a god who transforms to be told the truth, and in the end gets his bees back from the carcasses of oxen. It is a myth of loss and return. The collector who chooses that name for his collection, and who will die six years later leaving it orphaned, could not have known. But the name ended up fitting in a way that no editorial choice foresees.

Something nobody tells you about the Museo Aristaios - Auditorium Parco della Musica - Sinopoli Collection

What nobody says is that this museum is open in practice only on weekends, and that the information in circulation on this point is conflicting. The Auditorium's official pages list opening on Saturday from 11:00 and on Sundays and holidays from 10:00, with closing at 18:00 in the standard time period and at 20:00 on daylight saving time. Other institutional pages instead report continuous hours throughout the week. Anyone arriving on a Tuesday risks a wasted trip. The prudent rule is only one: call 06 80241281 the day before, or check the official page on auditorium.com. 30 seconds against an hour of public transport lost.

The second thing nobody says concerns events. The Museo Aristaios occupies a connecting space inside a complex that hosts fairs, trade shows, festivals, award ceremonies, television shoots. When one of these events occupies the common spaces, access to the exhibition rooms can be suspended without notice, and the official website also states it with a dry formula: the exhibition spaces may be inaccessible during particular events. It's not a defect of organization, it's the nature of the place. A museum inside a theater lives by the theater's rules.

The third, and perhaps the most useful: the Auditorium's museums are two, not one. Many visitors enter the Museo Aristaios, look at the vases, leave and go away, without suspecting that a few meters away there is an in situ archaeological area with the remains of a Roman villa of 2,000 square meters and a second museum that tells its story. There is no signage that shouts. Ask the staff where the Archaeological Museum and the Roman villa are: they will point out the route, and it's the second half of the visit.

The advice I give you for visiting the Museo Aristaios - Auditorium Parco della Musica - Sinopoli Collection

The main advice is to reverse the order that would come naturally. Don't start with the vases. Start with the Roman villa and the Archaeological Museum, which tell what was here before the Auditorium, and then move on to the Sinopoli collection. This way the route goes from the local to the Mediterranean, from the farm of Archaic Latium to the vases that arrived here from Athens and Taranto through the 20th-century antiquities market. Done in the reverse order, the archaeological area looks like an appendix. Done this way, the ceramics museum becomes the crowning of an argument.

Second piece of advice, on method. Pick eight pieces and give each of them three minutes, instead of looking at 161 for 10 seconds each. The essential list, if you need it: the Cycladic marble vase, a Mycenaean vase, a Corinthian aryballos with its animals, a piece attributed to Lydos, a Nikosthenic amphora, a red figure by the Syleus Painter, an Apulian or Daunian vase, and the terracotta cube with concave sides that nobody can explain. In 40 minutes you have crossed 3,000 years with full knowledge.

Third piece of advice, and it holds as a general rule in any ceramics museum. Look at the profiles before the figures. The shape of a vase can be dated more precisely than the drawing: the curve of the shoulder, the attachment of the handles, the height of the foot change from decade to decade and are the first thing a scholar reads. If you get in the habit of following the profile with your eye from the rim to the foot before looking at the painted scene, after three museums you start recognizing the periods on your own.

Fourth and last. Go early on Saturday morning, just after opening. The complex is still empty, the light that enters from the windows of the peduncolo is the best of the day and there will be nobody between you and the cases. Then go out, cross the Cavea and go get a coffee looking at the three lead shells. It is a way of spending a morning that costs the price of a bus ticket.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely mentioned

The fact is this: the Auditorium Parco della Musica exists in the form it has because under it they found a Roman villa, and that discovery changed the project while it was underway. Everybody knows it, in principle. Almost nobody remembers it when walking across the piazza.

The works started in 1995. The excavations, followed by the Office of Ancient Monuments and Excavations of the municipal Superintendency in agreement with the Archaeological Superintendency of Rome, brought to light between 1995 and 1998 a complex of over 2,000 square meters with six periods of occupation, from the middle of the sixth century BC to the beginning of the third century AD. The construction site stopped, the project was revised, the timelines lengthened, the costs rose and the city controversy became ferocious: there were people asking to cover everything up and go on. The opposite line prevailed. The remains were preserved in situ and integrated into the complex, and the very arrangement of the volumes bears a trace of it.

The result is that today Rome has an auditorium of international rank built around a farm of the fifth century BC, with the cast of the base of the oil press, the eaves tile with the head of Achelous, the models of the building phases and the large scale model. And it has, as a side effect, an audience that walks past an archaeological area without knowing it on the way to a concert.

I'll add the least cited corollary of all. It is the reason the Museo Aristaios exists too. If in 1998 they had covered up the excavation, the Auditorium would have had no archaeological vocation, no museum, no already equipped museum space, and the Sinopoli collection would have ended up in a storeroom or in another city. A decision taken on the construction site 25 years ago determined where 161 Greek vases would end up. Cities work like that, by chains of events that nobody planned.

The right photo to take at the Museo Aristaios - Auditorium Parco della Musica - Sinopoli Collection

The photograph worth taking home is not the close-up of a vase. Everyone takes that one, it comes out badly because of the reflections and you find it better made in any catalog. The right photo is the one of the 11 cylindrical cases in a row: stand at one end of the sequence, crouch down to the height of the cylinders and frame in perspective, so that the glass columns line up one behind the other and you see together the travertine floor and the brick wall at the back. It is the image that gives back the designers' idea, the archaeological forest, and at the same time the relationship between the objects and the architecture.

On reflections, which are the real enemy in this hall. Don't use flash: it bounces off the glass and gives you back a white sun at the center of the image. Instead bring the lens close to the glass until it almost touches, with the camera perpendicular to the surface, and most reflections disappear. If you have a smartphone, cup your hand around the lens to make shade. If you have a compact or a reflex, a circular polarizer solves it, as long as you don't use it on tempered glass, where it generates iridescent halos.

The second photograph to take is a side shot: stand to the side of one of the two big extra-clear glass envelopes, the one 24 meters long, and exploit the perspective vanishing line of the pieces placed at different heights. A kind of musical staff comes out, which is precisely what the designers had in mind when talking about rhythm. Nobody takes it, and it always works.

Outside, finally, the obligatory photo is from the top of the Cavea toward the three lead-clad volumes, best in the late afternoon when the metal takes on the color of the sky. If you then want the photograph nobody has, go down toward the archaeological area and frame together the ancient wall in opus reticulatum and the lead shell of one of the halls: 2,000 years and 20 years in the same frame. That is the photograph that tells this place better than any caption.

Some important events that happened here in history

The first event is from the sixth century BC and has no witnesses: the installation of a rustic farm of the Archaic age on this land, in the middle of the century, in an area that was then open countryside between the city and the Tiber. That farm was destroyed around 500 BC, and on its ruins rose a manor villa with a walled village for the agricultural labor. If you look for a moment when this piece of land entered history, it is that one: the passage from a smallholding to an organized farm estate, with the oil press, at a date that historians of the Roman economy have debated for decades.

The second event is around 300 BC, when the manor part of the villa was renovated and the large eaves tile with the head of Achelous was placed on the roof. It is a gesture of self-representation: a family of the Roman countryside equipping itself with an ornament from the Greek repertoire, at a time when Rome is conquering central Italy. The complex will stay alive until the beginning of the third century AD, then it will be abandoned and buried for 1,800 years.

The third event is from 1995: the opening of the Auditorium construction site and the reappearance of all this under the bulldozers. Between 1995 and 1998 the excavation yields over 2,000 square meters of structures and six periods of life. Renzo Piano's project, winner of the 1993 invitation-only competition, is modified to preserve the remains.

The fourth is April 21, 2002, Rome's birthday: the Sala Sinopoli is inaugurated, the first of the three. On December 21 of the same year the Sala Santa Cecilia opens and the complex is complete. In those months Rome recovers, after decades of delays, a concert hall worthy of the name, a question open since the demolition of the Augusteo in the 1930s.

The fifth is 2010: the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities buys from the heirs of Giuseppe Sinopoli 161 works of his archaeological collection. The sixth is December 11, 2012, when the Sala del Peduncolo, redeveloped and fitted out to a design by the studio Alvisi Kirimoto with ministerial funds and a contribution from the Rome Chamber of Commerce, is inaugurated as the Museo Aristaios. From the next day it is open to the public free of charge. The agreement that makes the operation possible binds the Ministry, Roma Capitale and the Fondazione Musica per Roma.

The seventh and last is from 2020, and concerns the name on the facade: the City Council approves naming the complex after Ennio Morricone, who died that year. Since then the museum's full address is Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, and in the same structure coexist the name of Rome's composer and the collection of the conductor-archaeologist. It doesn't often happen that two names like these sit on the same buzzer.

Who has passed through the Museo Aristaios - Auditorium Parco della Musica - Sinopoli Collection

The first name is obvious and must be said in full: Giuseppe Sinopoli, who never saw this museum. He died in 2001, 11 years before the inauguration. Did he at least conduct in this complex? No: the Auditorium opened in 2002. The link is of another nature, and in a certain sense stronger. The Sala Sinopoli was named after him because he had been music director of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the institution that has its home in this complex, from 1983 to 1987. The collection arrived 10 years after the hall. He, in person, never entered here.

The second name is Enrico Paribeni, archaeologist, son of Roberto Paribeni and in turn father of Andrea, a dynasty of Italian archaeology. It was he who edited in 1995 the Aristaios catalog of the Sinopoli collection for Marsilio. He studied and published these vases when they were still in a private house, and without his work the core would not have had the scientific certification that later allowed the public purchase.

The third is Renzo Piano, who has walked on this ground as a designer from 1993 on, and who had to negotiate the form of his own building with the archaeologists. The fourth, by association, is Zaha Hadid, whose MAXXI rises 400 meters away: two Pritzker Prize winners a stroll apart, which is an architectural density that Rome rarely grants.

Then there are the musicians. Since April 2002 the major orchestras and soloists of the world have played in this complex, and anyone who crossed the piazza to go into one of the three halls passed a few meters from the display cases. In the Sala Santa Cecilia and the Sala Sinopoli the conductors of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the guest ensembles of the international seasons have alternated. The Cavea, in summer, has hosted jazz, singer-songwriter song and electronic music. Ennio Morricone, after whom the complex has been named since 2020, conducted his own music there on several occasions before his death.

Finally, the ancient figures, who are the ones who truly inhabit the display cases. Lydos, the vase painter of Lydian origin who signed with his own ethnic in the Kerameikos of Athens in the middle of the sixth century BC. Nikosthenes, the potter who designed amphorae made to measure for the clientele of Cerveteri. The anonymous painters we call of Syleus, of Lysippides, of Eretria, and whose hands we recognize by the way they draw an ankle. And the young Lysippides, an Athenian in flesh and blood, declared beautiful by a painted inscription 2,500 years ago: of him we know nothing else, and he keeps being beautiful by written contract.

Quick questions about the Museo Aristaios - Auditorium Parco della Musica - Sinopoli Collection

How much does a ticket to the Museo Aristaios cost

Nothing. Entry is free for everyone, with no ticket and no card, and has been since the day of opening to the public in December 2012. It also applies to the Archaeological Museum of the Roman villa in the same complex.

Do you need to book to visit the Museo Aristaios

No, booking is not required. You show up during opening hours and go in. For organized groups and school classes it's better to announce yourselves at 06 80241281, both to avoid finding the room occupied by an event and to avoid arriving as 25 in a space that is still a connecting area.

What are the hours of the Museo Aristaios

The Auditorium's official website lists opening on Saturday from 11:00 to 18:00 on standard time and from 11:00 to 20:00 on daylight saving time, on Sundays and holidays from 10:00 to 18:00 on standard time and from 10:00 to 20:00 on daylight saving time. Other institutional sources report different hours. Before setting out, check the official page or call 06 80241281.

Is the Museo Aristaios open during the week

The ordinary opening listed by the Auditorium covers Saturday, Sunday and holidays. Anyone who wants to go on a weekday has to confirm beforehand by phone. It is the single reason people make the trip for nothing.

How long does the visit to the Museo Aristaios last

40 minutes for an attentive visit to the Sinopoli collection alone, 20 for a quick pass. With the Archaeological Museum and the Roman villa area it comes to an hour and a half. With a guide who tells about the pieces, a full two hours.

Where exactly is the Museo Aristaios

Inside the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, Viale Pietro de Coubertin 30, Flaminio neighborhood, in the Sala del Peduncolo, the connecting space between the buildings of the concert halls. The ministerial records give the internal address of Largo Luciano Berio.

How do you get to the Museo Aristaios by public transport

Buses 53, 168, 910 and 982 to Piazza Apollodoro or Piazza Mancini. Or metro line A to Flaminio and then line 2 toward Piazza Mancini, which because of work on Viale delle Belle Arti runs with replacement buses. From Termini station the 910 is the most direct solution.

Is there parking at the Auditorium Parco della Musica

Yes, a paid underground lot with about a thousand spaces, with access from Viale Pietro de Coubertin. Sunday morning is the time slot when arriving by car makes the most sense.

Can you take photographs at the Museo Aristaios

Photographs without flash and without a tripod are normally allowed, as in most Italian museums. The staff in the room have the last word anyway, and a question at the entrance avoids arguments. Flash, on a display case, is useless: it only produces a reflection at the center of the image.

Is the Museo Aristaios wheelchair accessible

The Auditorium is a building of 2002 designed with accessibility criteria: level routes, elevators, equipped restrooms and reserved spaces in the underground parking. The exhibition rooms are on the level of the interior routes. For particular needs, or to know if there are temporary construction sites, the number is 06 80241281.

Is the Museo Aristaios suitable for children

Yes, with some precautions. The display cases play on heights and the youngest see well only the low band. The 11 cylindrical cases, by contrast, are readable even at one meter of height. Greek vases tell stories, and turning the visit into a hunt for painted animals and heroes almost always works. The terracotta cube that was perhaps a game and the small jug that was perhaps a baby bottle are the two pieces children remember.

How many pieces are there in the Museo Aristaios

161 works, bought in 2010 by the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities from the heirs of Giuseppe Sinopoli and on permanent display since December 2012 over more than 300 square meters.

What do you see at the Museo Aristaios

Greek and Italic ceramics from 3200 BC to about 300 BC: Minoan, Mycenaean, Geometric, Corinthian, Laconian, East Greek, Attic black-figure and red-figure, Italiot red-figure and indigenous Daunian productions. In addition a marble vase of Cycladic production of 3200-2700 BC, Etruscan and Magna Graecia bronze vessels, and a series of statuettes largely votive with deities, worshippers and animals.

Who was Giuseppe Sinopoli

Conductor, composer, physician and archaeologist. Born in Venice on November 2, 1946, graduated in medicine and surgery at Padua in 1972 with a thesis in criminal anthropology, pupil of Bruno Maderna and Hans Swarowsky, music director of Santa Cecilia from 1983 to 1987, principal conductor of the Philharmonia in London from 1984 to 1994 and of the Dresden Staatskapelle from 1992, artistic and music director of the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma from 1999. He died in Berlin on April 20, 2001, struck by a heart attack on the podium of the Deutsche Oper while conducting Aida. The degree in archaeology at the Sapienza was awarded to him posthumously: the thesis defense was set for the day of the funeral.

Why is the museum called Aristaios

Aristaios is the Greek form of the name Aristaeus, son of Apollo and the nymph Cyrene, the god who taught men beekeeping, cheese production and herding, protagonist of the epyllion that closes the fourth book of Virgil's Georgics. The name comes from the scientific catalog of the collection, Aristaios. La collezione Giuseppe Sinopoli, published by Marsilio in 1995 edited by Enrico Paribeni.

What is the difference between the Museo Aristaios and the Auditorium's Archaeological Museum

They are two distinct museums in the same complex, both free and with the same hours. The Museo Aristaios displays Giuseppe Sinopoli's private collection of Greek and Italic ceramics. The Archaeological Museum tells the story of the Roman villa discovered during the Auditorium excavations between 1995 and 1998, with the remains visible in situ, models, scale model, the cast of the oil press and the eaves tile with the head of Achelous. Visit them together: they complete each other.

What are black figures and red figures

Two decoration techniques of Greek ceramics. In black figures, in use from the seventh century BC, the figure is a dark silhouette on the pale ground of the clay and the inner details are incised with a point. In red figures, invented in Athens around 530 BC, the ground is black and the figures stay in the color of the clay, with the details drawn with a brush: hence the chiaroscuro, the twisting of bodies and the foreshortening. In both cases the black is not paint but refined clay, and it is born in the kiln with a three-phase firing.

What is Etruscan bucchero

A ceramic black throughout the thickness of the wall, obtained by firing in a reducing atmosphere and burnished with a stick until it reflects. It was born at Cerveteri around 675 BC. It is distinguished into thin bucchero, with walls of two or three millimeters, and heavy bucchero, later, with relief decoration. It imitated burnished metal vessels, that is, the table service of the very rich.

Is there a bookshop or a cafe

The Auditorium has a cafe, food service and a bookshop along the common routes, independent of the museum. Coat check and storage are tied to the events on the program and not to the museum visit.

Is the Museo Aristaios free on the first Sunday of the month

The question has a simple answer: entry here is always free, every day of opening, so the first Sunday of the month changes nothing. It is one of the few Roman museums for which the national free-Sundays initiative makes no difference.

Can you visit the Museo Aristaios before or after a concert

It depends on the concert time. The museum closes at 18:00 or 20:00 depending on the season, while evening concerts start later. A visit in the late afternoon before a show is therefore possible on opening days. The reverse, entering after the concert, is not.

How long is the wait in line at the Museo Aristaios

There is no wait. Lines in front of this museum are rare, and it is the main reason to recommend it on high-season weekends, when the historic center is impassable.

Is it worth going if you know nothing about archaeology

Yes, on one condition: arrive with a minimum of preparation, because the captions don't do the work for you. With half an hour of reading on the techniques and shapes of vases, this collection becomes readable and stays with you. Without it, they are 161 beautiful and mute objects.

What can you see around the Museo Aristaios

The MAXXI by Zaha Hadid on Via Guido Reni, 400 meters away. The Palazzetto dello Sport by Nervi and Vitellozzi in Piazza Apollodoro. The Stadio Flaminio by Pier Luigi and Antonio Nervi. The 1960 Olympic Village. Ponte Milvio and the Tiber to the north. The Museo Etrusco di Villa Giulia and the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna to the south, along Viale delle Belle Arti.

What is the most important piece in the Aristaios Museum

From a scientific point of view, the Attic vases: the works attributable to Lydos and the Lysippides Painter among the black figures, those of the Syleus Painter and the Eretria Painter among the red figures. From the point of view of memory, the Cycladic marble vase of 3200-2700 BC, which is the oldest piece and also the quietest. From a human point of view, the terracotta cube with concave sides whose use nobody knows.

To finish, the only thing that really matters. Rome has hundreds of museums and at least half of the small ones live in indifference: the Aristaios Museum is perhaps the most glaring case, because its collection would sit perfectly well in a room of Villa Giulia and instead it lives in a corridor between two concert halls, free, half empty, open two days a week. If you have a Saturday morning and no plans, go. Bring the fourth book of the Georgics, read the night before, start from the Roman villa, finish in front of the red figures, and go out into the Cavea to look at the lead shells. Then tell me if a museum really needs a line out front to be a good museum.

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

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