Rome Guide
Rome
Palazzo dei Conservatori
Opening time: Tues– Sun 9am–8pm
Price: €6.50 with Palazzo Nuovo, €8.50 for Centrale Montemartinias well, valid 7 days
Website: www.museicapitolini.org
The Palazzo dei Conservatori and Palazzo Nuovo together make up the Capitoline Museums, containing some of the city's most important ancient sculpture and art. The Palazzo dei Conservatori holds the larger, more varied collection. Among its many treasures are the so-called Spinario, a Roman statue of a boy picking a thorn out of his foot; the Etruscan bronze she-wolf nursing the mythic founders of the city, and the Hannibal Room, covered in wonderfully vivid fifteenth-century paintings recording Rome's wars with Carthage, and so named for a rendering of Hannibal seated impressively on an elephant. The wonderfully airy new wing holds the original of Marcus Aurelius, formerly in the square outside, alongside a giant bronze statue of Constantine, or at least its head, hand and orb. Nearby stands the rippling bronze of Hercules, behind which are part of the foundations and a retaining wall from the original temple of Jupiter here, discovered when the work for the new wing was undertaken. And when museum fatigue sets in you can climb up to the floor above to the second-floor café, whose terrace commands one of the best views in Rome. The second- floor pinacoteca holds Renaissance painting from the fourteenth century to the late seventeenth century. Highlights include a couple of portraits by Van Dyck, a penetrating Portrait of a Crossbowman by Lorenzo Lotto, a pair of paintings from 1590 by Tintoretto, and a very fine early work by Lodovico Carracci, Head of a Boy. In one of the two large main galleries, there's a vast picture by Guercino, depicting the Burial of Santa Petronilla (an early Roman martyr who was the supposed daughter of St Peter), and two paintings by Caravaggio, one a replica of the young John the Baptist which hangs in the Palazzo Doria-Pamphilj, the other an early work known as The Fortune-Teller.