Galleria Borghese

de Anna Coliva, Geraldine Leardi

This book is dedicated to the The Borghese Family and Antiquity exhibition. Those were extraordinary and perhaps once-in-a-lifetime days, when absolutely magnificent ancient marbles such as the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, the Cupid astride a Centaur, and the Silenus and the infant Bacchus returned to occupy their place in the Borghese collection and in the Villa on the Pincian Hill. 0Acquired by the cardinal nepote Scipione Borghese in the 17th century and then sold, together with hundreds of other sculptures, to Napoleon by Prince Camillo in 1807, they became part of the core archaeological collections of the Louvre, where they are now enjoyed by millions of visitors. In 2011 some of these amazing works traveled in the opposite direction, from Paris to Rome, enabling us, for just a few months, to reassemble the heart of that collector?s will ? a vision completely new in the contemporary world ? and to make its beauty and value topical.