Torlonia Museum
The Torlonia Museum was a museum in Rome, which housed the Torlonia Collection of ancient sculptures.History
The collection of 620 marble and alabaster statues and sarcophagi dating to the Roman Empire period has been described as the "most important private museum of sculpture in the world" by Italian art critic Federico Zeri and, according to The Daily Telegraph, has been "said to rival of the Vatican." The Encyclopædia Britannica considers the most significant of the works a relief of Heracles freeing Theseus and Peirithoos and a sculpture of "Hestia Giustiniani". Overall, the collection contains 20 statues of Hercules, about 30 of Venus, and 100 of the Caesars and their families, among them a bust of Julius Caesar. Besides, it includes sculptures of the gods from Roman mythology and Roman copies of Greek statues.
According to the newspaper The Daily Telegraph, the namesake of the collection and then the museum, the Roman Torlonia family, received ownership of the collection around 1800 or in the early 19th century. The previous owners, the Giustiniani family, had taken out a loan from the Torlonia dynasty and secured it with the collection, but then defaulted on paying back the loan.
Alessandro Torlonia, heir to Giovanni, opened the collection to visitors in their family palace on Via della Lungara, close to the Tiber River, in 1893. In the 1960s, the museum was dismantled and the 77-room palace was converted into a 93-unit apartment building. The collection was put into storage and has not been publicly displayed. In May 2005 the government attempted to buy the collection for 1.2 billion but the offer has been declined.
