Over the course of the past decades, the city of Rome has been busy reorganizing its system of National Archaeological Museums. For about one hundred years, starting in the late nineteenth century, the bulk of Rome’s expansive collection of antiquities was displayed at the Baths of Diocletian. In the 1990s, however, the objects were divided up between four differen sites and spread across the city.
While all four branches of the museum are chock-full of interesting artworks and artifacts, it’s the Palazzo Massimo that we love the most. From the extraordinary frescoes that once graced the walls of the Empress Livia’s dining room to the colossal bronze sculpture of the Hellenistic Prince, the permanent collection of the Palazzo Massimo is simply awe-inspiring.
And now they’ve made it better. Until June 7th, a special exhibit called “Discover the Massimo” celebrates the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Palazzo Massimo by putting on display some newly restored paintings and sculptures — some of which have been out of the public eye for quite some time.
On a recent trip to the museum, we were quite happy to see that as part of the exhibit, archaeologists and restorers have fitted out a room with some 200 square meters of frescoes from a first-century columbarium, or burial chamber for cinerary urns, that was excavated between 1838 and 1922 in the Villa Doria Pamphili, Rome’s largest park.
What a treat! Though various colombaria have been excavated in and around Rome, none are open to the public, so the exhibition gives its visitors a chance to study a kind of Roman funerary architecture that’s normally not on view.
The term colombarium comes from the Latin colomba (dove), and the term originally referred to compartmentalized housing for doves and pigeons but was chosen by modern excavators to describe built tombs, the walls of which were lined with niches to hold cremation urns.
Such individual niches (visible in the photo of the museum exhibit above and the bottommost photo in this entry which shows the Doria Pamphili colombarium as it looked when excavated) were frequently marked by memorial plaques and portrait sculptures. As well, the walls of the colombaria were often decorated with painted images of mythological stories, landscape scenes, and animals, like those seen here.
Studies suggest that the popularity of colombaria in Rome was due, in part, to rising population and the need to dispose of a large number of bodies in an environment in which land for tombs was at a premium. The construction of such built tombs that could house the remains of hundreds of individuals certainly seems to provide a logical solution, though one that would be available to only some classes of society, for burial in a colombarium was not an inexpensive endeavor. Inscriptions tell us that they were built by collegia, cooperative funeral clubs, in which members contributed to a joint tomb.
For information on the Palazzo Massimo and its special exhibits, see the city of Rome’s tourism site (www.romaturismo.com) or the museum Web site, archeoroma.beniculturali.it/it/palazzo_massimo, which is in Italian-only.
