The story of this place
Consecrated in 9 BC to celebrate the peace Augustus brought after decades of civil war, the Altar of Augustan Peace is a masterpiece of Roman relief sculpture. Its walls carry a solemn procession of the imperial family—including a small child clutching a toga, one of the earliest naturalistic depictions of children in Western art. Over the centuries the altar sank into the Tiber's floodplain and broke apart; fragments surfaced as early as the 16th century, but only in 1937–1938, under Mussolini's regime keen to link itself to Augustus, was it fully excavated (partly by freezing the waterlogged soil) and reassembled. It now sits in a controversial modern glass pavilion by Richard Meier.