Discover Museum of the Ara Pacis

The Ara Pacis Augustae — the Altar of Augustan Peace — is an altar dedicated to the Pax Romana, commissioned by the Roman Senate on 4 July 13 BC to honour Augustus's return to Rome after three years in Hispania and Gaul, and consecrated on 30 January 9 BC.

It is a central sacrificial altar enclosed by precinct walls of Luna marble, carved inside and out. The long processional friezes on the north and south walls show the state ceremony for the altar's dedication, with identifiable members of the imperial household among the participants.

It is not where it stood, and not facing the way it faced. The monument was reassembled in its present location in 1938, turned 90 degrees counterclockwise, so the original western side now faces south. The orientation a visitor reads it in today is a twentieth-century decision.

Since 2006 it has stood inside a glass and steel pavilion by Richard Meier, built on the footprint of the Fascist-era shelter it replaced. Both buildings were attacked on the same grounds, and a Roman mayor was still publicly promising to demolish this one two years after it opened.

The Ara Pacis Augustae — the Altar of Augustan Peace — is an altar dedicated to the Pax Romana, commissioned by the Roman Senate on 4 July 13 BC to honour Augustus's return to Rome after three years in Hispania and Gaul, and consecrated on 30 January 9 BC.

It is a central sacrificial altar enclosed by precinct walls of Luna marble, carved inside and out. The long processional friezes on the north and south walls show the state ceremony for the altar's dedication, with identifiable members of the imperial household among the participants.

It is not where it stood, and not facing the way it faced. The monument was reassembled in its present location in 1938, turned 90 degrees counterclockwise, so the original western side now faces south. The orientation a visitor reads it in today is a twentieth-century decision.

Since 2006 it has stood inside a glass and steel pavilion by Richard Meier, built on the footprint of the Fascist-era shelter it replaced. Both buildings were attacked on the same grounds, and a Roman mayor was still publicly promising to demolish this one two years after it opened.

The Ara Pacis is a central sacrificial altar inside a walled precinct, built in Luna marble, standing on a podium and originally entered from the west up a short flight of steps. The design takes a traditional Roman altar layout and covers its precinct walls in carved panels — the combination is what makes it unusual, not either element alone.

The two faces of the precinct wall do different jobs, and it is worth knowing which is which before you look. On the outside, the lower register is the dense acanthus frieze and the upper register carries the processional and mythological panels. On the inside, the wall is hung with carved bucrania — ox skulls — alternating with garlands of fruit and flowers, and its lower part is cut to imitate wooden planks. Those planks are an argument rather than a texture: they connect the monument to the earlier altars traditionally placed at the boundaries of Rome's pomerium, claiming ancestral ritual practice for a very new regime.

The central altar itself carries the rules. Fragments survive of scenes illustrating the lex arae — the regulations for sacrifices performed here — showing attendants leading animals in a style common in the late Republic. They depict the ritual rather than ornament, which is why they look plainer than the precinct walls.

The modern building is a second subject, and a contested one. Richard Meier's 2006 pavilion is a glass and steel structure on the site of Mussolini's, considerably larger than what it replaced, and divided into several rooms beyond the hall holding the altar. Nicolai Ouroussoff of The New York Times judged it “absurdly over-scale… indifferent to the naked beauty of the dense and richly textured city around it”; in July 2008 the mayor pledged to pull it down, then changed his mind. It reads almost entirely from the outside, which is free; what the ticket buys is the altar.

What stands in the pavilion is substantially a 1938 construction. Fragments of the altar were first rediscovered in 1568, when portions of the frieze came up beneath the Palazzo Peretti in Lucina, near San Lorenzo in Lucina and the modern Via del Corso. They were treated as loose sculpture rather than as one monument, and were dispersed accordingly — to the Villa Medici, the Vatican, the Uffizi and the Louvre. More surfaced in 1859 under the Teatro Olimpia, another Peretti property, and scholars recognised that the new pieces and the old belonged together. Friedrich von Duhn identified the reliefs as the Ara Pacis between 1879 and 1881. Three centuries elapsed between the first fragment and knowing what it was.

The 1903 dig stopped because the building above it was at risk. After von Duhn's identification the Ministry of Public Education was formally asked to resume excavation, and the work went ahead on the generosity of Edoardo Almagià, who both gave permission and paid for it. It reached fifty-three fragments — roughly half of all the surviving material — and was then halted on safety grounds, because digging further threatened the structure of the Teatro Olimpia standing over it.

The remainder came out of frozen ground, against a deadline. In February 1937 the Italian Cabinet ordered the altar excavated and reconstructed for the two-thousandth anniversary of Augustus's birth. To get the last fragments out from under what was by then the Cinema Nuovo Olimpia without bringing it down, engineers froze approximately seventy cubic metres of soil and cut the pieces from it. The reconstruction had to be finished by 23 September 1938.

That deadline is why the monument has modern portions. Only limited ancient material survived, and the documentation of what the rest had looked like amounted to little more than a few Roman coins. Completing a coherent altar therefore required design rather than assembly: the Italian artist Odoardo Ferretti worked out the missing sections so the genuine fragments could be set into a whole. The same campaign set the altar down beside the Mausoleum of Augustus turned 90 degrees counterclockwise from its original orientation, so the side that faced west now faces south. Both the monument's completeness and its compass bearing are decisions of the 1930s.

The shelter over it has been built twice and nearly demolished twice. The 1938 pavilion was by Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo, part of Mussolini's project to clear an ancient-Roman quarter around the Mausoleum to the glory of Fascist Italy; several dozen surrounding buildings were levelled for it, and local complaints began an argument that has not stopped since. In 2006 that building — known in Rome as the teca del Morpurgo — was pulled down and replaced on the same footprint by Richard Meier's much larger glass and steel structure. The criticism transferred intact: Nicolai Ouroussoff of The New York Times called it “absurdly over-scale… indifferent to the naked beauty of the dense and richly textured city around it”, and in July 2008 the then mayor Gianni Alemanno, backed by the culture undersecretary Francesco Maria Giro, pledged to tear it down, before later changing his position. The altar has spent its entire modern life inside a building somebody wanted removed.

What am I actually looking at? The Ara Pacis Augustae — an altar to the Pax Romana, commissioned by the Senate on 4 July 13 BC and consecrated on 30 January 9 BC — and, in large part, a 1938 reconstruction of one. Only about half the surviving material had been recovered by 1903, and the missing portions were designed by the artist Odoardo Ferretti to a 1938 deadline.

Why does the orientation matter? Because it was changed. The monument was reassembled in 1938 turned 90 degrees counterclockwise, so the original western side — the entrance front — now faces south. Read the friezes knowing that and they make sense; read them off a compass and they do not.

Who is the woman on the famous panel? Nobody agrees. She has been identified as Pax, Italia, Venus and Tellus. The disagreement is not a gap in the record but a live argument about what the altar is chiefly asserting.

What does it cost? The museum ticket is €14.00 full and €8.50 reduced, same-day at the ticket office with no fee; buying ahead adds €1. Temporary exhibitions are priced separately and in combination — during the 2026 Mapplethorpe show, €15.00 for the exhibition alone and €23.00 for both. An exhibition-only ticket does not include the altar.

Is it free for residents? Free for residents of Rome and the metropolitan city and for MIC cardholders, on proof — but that exemption does not cover the exhibition space.

Do I need to book? No. Groups of 11 to 25 plus a guide book free on 060608 and buy at least five tickets in advance.

Why is the modern building controversial? It replaced a Fascist-era pavilion on the same site in 2006 and is much larger. A New York Times critic called it absurdly over-scale, and in 2008 the mayor of Rome promised to demolish it before changing his mind.

How long does it take, and is it accessible? An hour. It is one level, step-free and small, and it is air-conditioned.