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A few photos from the stunning Valentino exhibit at Rome’s new Ara Pacis Museum. The exhibit opened to the public yesterday and can be visited through 28 October 2007. We can’t say that we loved every one of the fancy frocks, but the show is a spectacle not to be missed.

A procession of women clad in white appears to enter the museum as a chorus of red-dressed women pay homage to the Ara Pacis, an Altar of Peace, built for Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, between 13 - 9 BC.

The exhibit - which features 300 dresses designed by Valentino over the course of his 45-year career - defines Valentino’s place in Rome’s long visual history, for it juxtaposes his oh-so-classical fashion with the idealized figures featured in the relief sculptures on the Ara Pacis.

Just as the Ara Pacis was created to celebrate Augustus’s triumph return to Rome after an empire-building campaign in Spain and Gaul, so the Valentino exhibit honors Valentino’s return to Rome. For the first time in seventeen years, the emperor of style presented his new haute couture collection in the Eterna rather than in Paris.

And, just as the Ara Pacis - with its elaborately carved relief sculptures - was meant to celebrate the Golden Age that was the product of the peace brought to Rome by Augustus in the first century BC, so too the Valentino show is a reminder of the dolce vita years in which Valentino began his career.

For more photos of Valentino’s retrospective at the Ara Pacis, visit Rome With A View

The 2007 Fall/Winter haute couture shows have begun in Paris, but Italian designer Valentino is leaving that scene behind, choosing instead to show his new collection in Rome where he will also stage an elaborate three-day celebration of his 45th anniversary as a stylist. The move from France to Italy is the designer’s way of paying homage to the Eternal City, both for receiving him so enthusiastically when he began his career half a century ago, and for the changes that have taken place across the Eterna in the past decades, turning it into a world-class cultural center: “I think of Rome not as a fashion capital but a culture capital,” he said. “I’ve come back after all those years in Paris because I think it was only right to show affection for the city that adopted me almost 50 years ago.”

The fashion show and its accompanying celebrations commence this weekend and Valentino has promised to turn heads with “the biggest show the fashion world has ever seen”. Festivities begin with the inauguration of the exhibit, “Valentino: 45 Years of Style,” in Rome’s new Ara Pacis Museum. Some 300 of the designer’s dresses will embellish Richard Meier’s starkly modern new museum, wittily surrounding the Altar of Peace created for the first Roman emperor, Augustus, between 13 and 9 BC. Though the exhibit does not open to the public until 8 July, we’ve managed to sneak a few photos of luxuriously-clad mannequins admiring the oh-so-classical ancient altar.

Other events include a massive party on the ruins of the second-century Temple of Venus & Rome near the Colosseum, where Oscar-winning set designer Dante Ferretti has spent the past weeks creating a stunning temporary reconstruction of the building. In exchange for use of the site, Valentino has donated 200,000 euro for restoration and preservation of the temple.

The new haute couture collection will be shown to 1000 guests in the beautifully frescoed fifteenth century complex of Santo Spirito in Sassia, near Saint Peter’s Basilica, and will be followed by a gala dinner in the Villa Borghese.

The star-studded guest list includes government and city officials, friends, celebrities, clients and leading figures from the international press. Among those confirmed by Valentino include Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker, Claudia Schiffer, Donald and Melanie Trump, Elle Macpherson, Meryl Streep, Princess Caroline of Monaco with Princes Andrea and Pierre Casiraghi and Princess Charlotte, and Rupert Everett. Valentino’s office touts the event as a boon to the Roman economy, for some 250 waiters, 250 drivers, 200 security staff, 130 people involved in the staging of the events, 100 organizers, 60 hostesses, 20 cooks, and 20 sommeliers will be employed.

For more photos of Valentino’s retrospective at the Ara Pacis, visit Rome With A View