18 September 2007 – 24 June 2008
Roma follows the story and the arts of the city from the late Empire to the 20th century. Few cities have experienced Rome’s extremes of fortune; squalor and poverty in the early middle ages and great prosperity in the 8th and 9th centuries as she became the capital of the Christian west. Three hundred years of civil war and the loss of the papacy to Avignon brought poverty again followed by the wealth and splendour of the Renaissance and Counter Reformation. Even after the Church ceased to be a major patron, Rome remained a cultural power house, attracting artists of all kinds from across Europe. She survived Napoleon and the struggle for the unification of Italy to emerge as the capital of the new kingdom in 1870. Since then the city has had many roles, the Holy City, Mussolini’s New Rome and the ‘Hollywood of Europe’ but in every case the past and the present are inextricably mixed, Rome remains the ‘Eternal City’.