Mussolini arrived to perform the inauguration, and what follows is perhaps the shortest period of glory any museum has ever enjoyed. The Nave Romane rose again only to be extinguished. And so what remains is the world's largest conceptual museum. A museum whose message is contained in its emptiness. And it is this emptiness that speaks volumes.
Museums are in their origins little more than trophy houses for European empires to trot their loot.
It is in this long shadow that the Museo delle Nave Romane exists. Viewed in this way it is a kind of anti-museum, a living argument for the folly of the empires that created the concept of the trophy house. A work of art that though mired in tragedy, delivers a more complex lesson about empire than any collection of ruins.