FROM THE MUSEUM BACK TO THE COLLECTION: THE EXAMPLE OF THE COLLECTION OF VILLA WOLKONSKY IN ROME
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2020-12-13

Villa Wolkonsky is the official Residence of the British Ambassador to Italy in Rome and it houses in its garden hundreds of Roman antiquities. In 2011, 360 marbles of the collection were restored and for conservation reasons, most of them have been placed in two 19th-century greenhouses, named the “Wolkonsky Greenhouses Museum”. However, the Museum of the British Embassy can tell us a long story rich of events, since the marbles were collected from the beginning of the 19th-century. In fact, the history of the Villa as such began in 1830 when the Russian princess Zinaide Wolkonsky transformed a vineyard on the Esquiline hill into an English garden, where she built a summerhouse and displayed various antiquities in the scenic backdrop of 36 arches of the aqueduct of Nero. At first, the Villa Wolkonsky was a place of leisure then a family residence, but the whole property became a diplomatic seat, first German (1922-1945) and later British (1947-the present). The majority of the antiquities - especially sarcophagi and statues – are still unpublished and represent various periods of ancient art, from the late Roman Republican period to the early Middle Ages. The Wolkonsky collection represents a perfect case study of antiquities collecting and its story takes place during several centuries, among different owners of different nationalities. This paper aims to retrace the history of the Wolkonsky Collection and the reasons for its realisation from its birth to the current museum exhibition, through photographic and archival documents.


Author(s): Bucolo, Raffaella (Università degli Studi di Roma Sapienza; British School at Rome)