Restoration of the Ship Museum in Nemi: reopen the "home" of Caligula, the crazy Emperor
ROME – In spite of the “damnatio memoriae,” Caligula has finally his home.
With a few months later than the anniversary of the two thousand years since the birth (12 AD), but the third emperor of Rome, who was murdered at age 29 at the hands of his own Praetorian Guard, can really boast a museum of its own. It opens today in Nemi (at 18), in that great little gem that is the Museum of Roman Ships, which preserves the history of the two huge ships-palace that the emperor crazy and outrageous, despotic and grotesque (at least to read the memoirs biography of the historian Suetonius) had built on the lake in connection to his villa at the shrine of Diana.
DISCOVERIES UNSEEN
As if to take his revenge, the building-arsenal built in 1936 when it was inaugurated by Mussolini himself, reveals the new permanent exhibition dedicated to Gaius Germanicus Caesar, nicknamed Caligula because of the ‘murky’ the typical sandal, as told by Suetonius, loved to wear. The path, edited by Giuseppina Ghini director, proposed for the first time finds so far unpublished, originating in the ships of Caligula destroyed as infamous fire of 1944, which were returned by the Museum of the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, along with other artifacts, including portraits, sculptures, architectural elements, from the Sanctuary of Diana at Nemi Aricina. In short, it is an opportunity to get to know Caligula, a member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the third son of Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder, in its turn adopted by Tiberius, who ascended the throne at age 25, and according to sources ruled by a ‘ bloody madness “in a gesture of defiance than contempt for the Senate between extreme extravagance. And finally, according to Suetonius, just one of cryptoporticos excavated in the bowels of the Palatine under the house of Augustus, he died in a conspiracy on January 14, 41 d. C.
The COLOSSUS
Star of the new permanent exhibition “Caligula. The transgression in power “is the giant marble emperor, the famous portrait statue, one of the rare surviving examples to damnatio, over two meters high, reassembled into its parts marble of Paros after a careful and thorough restoration lasted six months, performed two years after the recovery by the Guardia di Finanza. The extraordinary work was, in fact, broken by grave robbers who had stolen in the territory of the lake. And it is around the statue that rotates throughout the show, with no prior findings from the excavations in the area, largely conducted with the University of Perugia, between the temple of Diana, the temple, the theater, the villa of Caligula and the Villa of Domitian at Castel Galdolfo. But many other exhibits were closed in the deposits of the Baths of Diocletian since the days of World War II. In all, nearly a thousand works. Stands the statue of Actaeon, the original pieces of the ships of Caligula, including small machinery and pottery of the valuable services used on board, including vessels of bronze and silver. Still, votive offerings, ceramic materials and architectural decorations of the temple. To enrich the exhibition, temporary loans of portrait-statues of characters of the family, as Tiberius, together with coins, gems and cameos. One interesting feature is also the movie to the restoration of the statue by Maurizio Marchetti for the Archaeological Superintendency of Lazio.
