Marmora Romana, the Colours of Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was anything but white. Its most sumptuous residences gleamed with green, red, yellow and purple marbles brought from every corner of the Empire. Marmora Romana, in the new Antiquarium space at Villa Albani Torlonia, invites adults and children to rediscover this surprising world of colours and precious stones. The exhibition adds twenty sculptures to the permanent display, fifteen of them recently restored, bringing the total number of works on view to 44. Busts, capitals, columns, sculptures and furnishings reveal how Rome’s expansion transformed materials from distant lands into symbols of beauty and prestige. The "star" of the exhibition is the monumental Torlonia Cup, also known as the Medici Cup, an enormous Roman krater carved from exceptionally rare green breccia quarried at Wadi Hammamat in the Egyptian desert, a stone so richly varied that it was known in antiquity as “a thousand stones”. Alongside it is the so-called Alexander, from the celebrated Giustiniani Collection, while a series of busts displayed on sections of ancient columns evokes the historic arrangement of the Museo Torlonia. A fascinating archaeological journey, with free admission, that reveals an unexpected side of Rome to families: a city that, two thousand years ago, loved colour far more than we might imagine.