Capitoline Museums

Fun Facts

• • Inside the Hall of the Geese, the bronze geese commemorate the sacred birds that saved Rome from a Gallic invasion in 390 BC by alerting the guards.
• • Palazzo Nuovo is filled with original 17th-century wood and gilded stucco decorations that have remained largely unchanged for centuries.
• • The Capitoline Museums are widely recognised as the oldest public museum in the world, preceding the British Museum and the Louvre by decades.
• • The Dying Gaul was once so famous it was one of the primary targets for Napoleon’s art commissioners to seize and take to Paris.
• • The Pinacoteca contains the celebrated painting The Fortune Teller by Caravaggio, showing a subtle moment of trickery and charm.
• • The Tabularium section offers a balcony view that is arguably the best and most comprehensive perspective of the Roman Forum available today.
• • The bronze horse found in Vicolo delle Palme is a rare example of a large ancient bronze sculpture found during archaeological excavations in the city.
• • The colossal marble head of Constantine seen in the courtyard belonged to a statue that would have stood over 12 metres tall.
• • The equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius survived the Middle Ages only because people mistakenly believed it depicted the Christian Emperor Constantine.
• • The legendary bronze She Wolf was originally missing the twins Romulus and Remus; they were added in the 15th century by Antonio del Pollaiolo.
• • The museum sits directly on top of the massive stone foundations of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, once the most important temple in Rome.
• • The museum’s collection of Roman portrait busts is so complete that historians can track the evolution of hairstyles and beard fashions over five centuries.
• • The underground passage known as the Galleria Lapidaria allows visitors to walk beneath the city’s administrative centre while viewing hundreds of ancient inscriptions.