And hence is the need of a new museum, and hence
will be the need of other new museums--who shall say how many? For truly
this Roman soil seems inexhaustible in buried treasures. There seems no
likelihood that the vein should be exhausted or die out. Every now and
then the excavators come upon "a fault," as the miners say, but the vein
is soon struck again.
And so the new museum at the Capitol has been rendered necessary. It was
inaugurated on the 25th of February in this year. It consists of twelve
rooms or galleries, part of which occupy the site of the apartments
which used to contain the archives, now moved to other quarters, and
part, including a large octagonal hall, the principal feature of the new
museum, have been newly constructed on ground which used to be the
garden of the Conservatori, the ancient municipal officers of the city,
so called. The entrance is by the main staircase of the palazzo of the
Conservatori, which is the building that forms the side of the square of
the Capitol to the right hand of the visitor as he ascends the
magnificent flight of steps from the Via di Ara Coeli. The steep sides
of the Capitoline Hill on either side of these steps has been recently
turned into a very well-kept and pretty garden, among the lawns and
shrubberies of which the attention of the stranger, as he ascends, may
be attracted by a neatly-painted iron cage in front of the mouth of a
little cavern in the rock, which is inhabited by a she-wolf in memorial
of the earliest traditions of the place.
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