The Ara Pacis Augustae is an altar to Peace, envisioned as a Roman goddess, celebrating the peace established in the Empire after Augustus’s victories in Spain and Gaul.
The Ara Pacis stood within an enclosure elaborately and finely sculpted entirely in gleaming white marble, depicting scenes of traditional Roman piety, in which the Emperor and his family were portrayed in the act of offering sacrifices to the gods.
Some of its parts, discovered in 1568 during the urbanization of the ancient Via Flaminia, now Via del Corso, passed into the hands of many collectors and then ended up in various museums.
Other parts of the Ara were located under a building at a depth of 7 meters, but it was possible to recover them only in 1937 thanks to a group of Italian engineers. The altar was reassembled in the new site, using casts of the missing parts, some walled up in Villa Medici, some exhibited in the Louvre.
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