Museum of the Ara Pacis Site Features

The processional friezes

The long north and south walls show the state ceremony for the altar's dedication. Among the participants are members of the major priestly colleges, magistrates carrying fasces, and identifiable members of the imperial household — Augustus, Agrippa, Livia, Tiberius and Julia. Women and children appear prominently, a notable change from earlier Roman public monuments, and scholars read the children as reinforcing Augustus's moral and family reforms.

The contested goddess panel

A seated female figure surrounded by children, vegetation and personifications of breezes, plants and animals, variously identified as Pax, Italia, Venus or Tellus. The disagreement is not a gap in the record — it is a live argument about what the altar is chiefly asserting.

The vegetal scrollwork

The lower register of the outer precinct wall: a continuous frieze of acanthus scrolls filled with animals, small birds, insects and mythological creatures, usually read as growth, abundance and the prosperity claimed for Augustus's rule. It is the most technically impressive carving on the monument and the easiest to walk past.

The plank carving inside

Step in and the inner face of the same wall is a different monument: bucrania — ox skulls — alternating with garlands, and a lower zone cut to imitate wooden planks. That imitation links the altar to the older altars set at the boundaries of Rome's pomerium, which is a claim to ancestral practice rather than a decorative choice. Look for planks on the outside and you will only find vines.

The lex arae fragments

On the central altar, scenes setting out the rules for the sacrifices performed here, with attendants leading animals — the working instructions of the monument rather than its message.

Richard Meier's pavilion

The 2006 building that encloses the Ara Pacis: a glass and steel structure on the site of Mussolini's shelter, considerably larger, and divided into several rooms beyond the altar hall. Free to look at from the Lungotevere and from Piazza Augusto Imperatore.