Visiting the Capitoline Museums

It’s Friday, it’s been raining for two days now, and I just want to crawl back under my wonderful covers again. But, I won’t!

I’ve realized it’s been awhile since I’ve written something about the city I call home (that would be Rome, of course) so it’s high-time I gave the Eternal City a little lovin’.

The truth is that since we live in Rome, for better or worse sometimes its magic just wears off. I know, I must be crazy, right? But when we are here, we get so dragged up in routine that we forget to go out and explore. But we’re working on that.

In fact, a few weekends ago, we went to the Capitoline Museums and were lucky enough to be able to see it for the special price of 1€ per person! That’s because it was a European Cultural Day (honestly, I don’t even know the correct English term for the event) and entrance to a bunch of state museums were reduced to 1€.

We hadn’t visited the Capitoline Museums because I had been putting it off. Jaime had been dying to see the original Roman she-wolf statue (you’ll see which one I’m talking about in a second), but every time we tried to go there was such a huge line to get in that we decided to just wait for the winter months when there were fewer tourists around. Then we heard about this event and we are so cheap that we decided to brave the crowds and pay the smaller fee (after all, it went pretty well for us when we did it for the Vatican Museums). Strangely enough, we arrived at around 10 a.m. and there was absolutely nobody in line! Hooray for us!

The Capitoline Museum consists of three buildings in Piazza del Campidoglio on Capitol Hill. They include Palazzo Senatorio, Palazzo dei Conservatori, and Palazzo Nuovo. The design of the buildings are Michelangelo’s work, though it took around 400 years to build. It is also the oldest museum in the world, since Pope Sixtus IV donated various bronze artifacts to the city, with the condition that they place it in the Palazzo dei Conservatori.

I was surprised at how much I liked the museum, especially some of the parts that contained many statues (I like those more than paintings) and I’m sharing with you some pictures since Jaime really out-did himself this time :).

How cool is this? Fragment from the Colossus of Constantine.

I came up with this picture idea and I’m proud of it!

This ceiling is beautiful!

Room of the Horatii and the Curiatii. Each wall had different frescos depicting different stories of the foundation of Rome. This one is a scene from the legend of Romulus & Remus, fed by a she-wolf and grew up to be the founders of Rome.