Capitoline Museums

In 1471 Pope Sixtus IV handed a group of ancient bronze statues over to the people of Rome and set them on the Capitoline Hill, the old centre of the ancient city. That gift is why these are often called the oldest public museums in the world, a collection given to citizens rather than kept for a prince.

The square they sit around was laid out by Michelangelo in the 1530s, a trapezoid with an oval pavement and three palaces, and at its centre once stood a bronze equestrian statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius that survived the Middle Ages only because people mistook him for the Christian emperor Constantine. The original is now indoors and a copy holds the square.

Among the bronzes Sixtus gave is the she-wolf who, in the legend, suckled Rome's founders Romulus and Remus. Nearby is the Dying Gaul, a marble copy of a Greek statue of a wounded warrior sinking to the ground, and the giant marble head and hand that are all that remain of a colossal seated Constantine.