ABOUT THE WRITER
JOE GARTMAN writes about travel, history
and culture, and divides his time between
the southwest US and Europe. Learn more
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Photography by Patricia GartmanNovember 2016 ITALIA! 59The ancient and the merely old, both anachronisticApollo, with friends, in the Sala MacchinePerspective view of the Atrium and Engine RoomGiovanni Montemartini, who designed the facility),
became a permanent satellite museum of the Musei
Capitolini. Conceptually, the museum is both a collection
of ancient art, particularly sculpture, and an example of the
technological skill of the first half of the 20th century.
There are two floors of exhibits in the plant. The
piano terra, the ground floor, features few of the giant
machines, but there are some superb works of art there,
including portrait heads of Augustus, Mark Antony,
Julius Caesar, and Cleopatra – a cast of characters worthy
of Hollywood or Cinecittà. There is a rather melancholy
statue of an aristocrat carrying the death masks of his
father and grandfather, probably in a funeral procession.
The first floor contains two large rooms: the Sala
Macchine, or engine room, and the Sala delle Caldate, the
boiler room. There is a balcony from which you can see
both great rooms, their enormous machines, the sculptures,
and a large mosaic floor, looking like a displaced section of
the famous Villa Romana del Casale floors in Sicily.
But it is in the engine room and boiler room that
the marble gods and goddesses are seen to best effect
among the giant, impressive, and yet rather touchingly
antique machines.
In fact, it is rather moving to look past the lovely,
gleaming-white marble figure of a woman (alas, minus
both arms and head, but still lovely), and see the large
control panel of a huge diesel-powered generator. There,
on the panel, the banks of analogue rotary dials and
controls seem as anachronistic as the statue. Where are
the digital readouts? It’s as if the modern pace of change
has accelerated so much that the funny old round dials
seem as ancient as the statue. It left me with the gloomy
thought that the marvels of our world may be forgotten
much sooner than the ancient gods.IT144.FastCulture.sg4.indd 59 28/09/2016 14:10pm