Museum of Roman Civilization

The Museum of Roman Civilization (Italian: Museo della Civiltà Romana) is a museum devoted to ancient Roman civilization, located in the Esposizione Universale Roma (EUR) district in southern Rome, Italy. Founded in 1952 and fully opened in 1955, the museum occupies a neoclassical building originally designed for the planned 1942 World's Fair. Its collection spans 12,000 square meters across 59 sections, using models, reproductions, casts, and original artifacts to illustrate Roman history from its origins to the 4th century CE. The museum has been closed for renovation since January 2014, with an estimated completion of works projected for the second quarter of 2026.

The museum's origins trace to a 1911 exhibition of Roman building models organized by archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani in the Baths of Diocletian, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Italian state. During the fascist period, the collection was relocated twice, notably to the Palazzo delle Esposizioni on Via Nazionale for the 1937 Mostra Augustea della romanità, celebrating the bimillenary of Augustus's birth. This exhibition was visited by Adolf Hitler in 1938. The neoclassical museum building was designed by architects Pietro Ascheri, D. Bernardini, Cesare Pascoletti, and Peressutti for the planned 1942 Esposizione Universale di Roma. The World's Fair was cancelled due to World War II, and the building remained unfinished until after the war. The museum partially opened in 1952 and was fully inaugurated in 1955 on the Palilia festival. The Museo dell'Impero Romano, opened by Benito Mussolini in 1929, provided ideological foundations by emphasizing Roman antiquity as the basis of Italian civilization. Since January 2014, the museum has been closed for urgent renovation. Initial plans to keep some rooms open proved impossible for safety reasons. Work began in June 2017, and as of January 2025 the design has been finalized with completion estimated for the second quarter of 2026, though no official reopening date has been announced. In 2022, the restored building partially reopened to house the planetarium and astronomical exhibition, while the main museum collections remained closed.

The museum's 12,000-square-meter exhibition is divided into 59 sections organized along three main itineraries: historical sections, thematic sections, and the Model of Imperial Rome. The collection encompasses the full territory of the Roman Empire and consists largely of reproductions, plaster casts, and models, alongside original architectural pieces, artworks, inscriptions, and everyday objects. The historical sections trace Roman civilization from legendary origins through the Julio-Claudian, Flavian, Trajanic, and Hadrianic periods to the Severan emperors and beyond, including the rise of Christianity. Thematic sections cover domains including school, living spaces, law, libraries, music, literature and science, medicine, industry and craft, agriculture, hunting and fishing, commerce, and Roman art. A dedicated room presents the casts of Trajan's Column arranged horizontally at ground level for readability.

The museum's signature holding is Il Plastico di Roma Imperiale, a 1:250 scale plaster model of ancient Rome in the age of Constantine I, created by Italo Gismondi. Ordered by Mussolini in 1933 for Augustus's bimillenary, work began in 1935 and continued until Gismondi's death in 1971. The model was based on the early 3rd-century Severan Forma Urbis Romae as updated by Lanciani and integrated with ongoing archaeological discoveries; areas lacking archaeological evidence were filled with representative residential construction. The city center was displayed at the 1937 Mostra Augustea, and the complete model within the Aurelian Walls was finished by 1955. The museum also holds a smaller Gismondi model of Republican Rome. Other notable items include a complete sequence of casts of the spiral reliefs of Trajan's Column, one of three sets of molds commissioned by Napoleon III in 1861 and later deposited by Pius XII, allowing 200 meters of narrative to be read at eye level. The collection also features a lifesize copy of the pronaos of the Monumentum Ancyranum with the Res Gestae Divi Augusti inscription, scale reconstruction models of the Theatre of Marcellus (1:100), the Tropaeum Alpium at La Turbie (1:20), and the Pont du Gard at Nîmes (1:200), a reconstructed Roman library based on Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, and a duplicate of the Great Jupiter Column from Mainz.

The museum building is situated in the EUR district, a planned urban quarter developed in the 1940s and 1950s in southern Rome. Designed in a neoclassical style by Pietro Ascheri, D. Bernardini, Cesare Pascoletti, and Peressutti between 1939 and 1941, the structure was intended as part of the architectural complex for the 1942 World's Fair. The premises are shared with a planetarium and astronomical museum, which since 2004 have been housed within the same building and reopened in the restored space in 2022. The museum's marble colonnade has appeared in film productions, standing in for a cemetery in the 2015 James Bond film Spectre after filming was barred from Campo Verano cemetery, and featuring in the 2024 film Conclave and the 1998 music video for Ace of Base's 'Cruel Summer.'

The Museum of Roman Civilization is located in the EUR district of Rome and is owned by EUR S.p.A. The museum has been closed for renovation since January 2014. While the building partially reopened in 2022 for the planetarium and astronomical exhibition, the main museum collections remain inaccessible to the public. As of January 2025, renovation design has been finalized with work estimated for completion in the second quarter of 2026, though no official reopening date has been announced. The official website is http://www.museociviltaromana.it/.