Carthage from Rome: Exhibition at the Colosseum

Carthage seen from Rome: an exhibition at the Colosseum. At the Colosseum 400 works explore the relationship of two enemy-friendly powers of ancient times

A journey through time with “the winged priestess”, the rich draped dresses and the proud and regal hairstyle carved on her sarcophagus, to discover Carthago. The immortal myth from today to March 29th, 2020 in the spaces of the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, the Temple of Romulus and the Imperial Ramp with over 400 exhibits from Italian and foreign museums, unpublished reconstructions and multimedia installations. Legends and history are inextricably intertwined in the exhibition, with Queen Didone-Elissa, a mythological figure narrated by Virgil, who describes her as the founder and first queen of Carthage, and Enea, whom she falls in love with, even though this love seems like a invention of the Latin authors. In older versions the queen, Pygmalion’s sister, king of Tire, marries her uncle and flees to Cyprus and then to Africa, committing suicide, and then the emblematic figure of the Hannibal leader.

A path where the most powerful cities of the ancient world, Rome and Carthage, enemy – friends, reveal all the secrets, from the charm to the power, in the first great exhibition entirely dedicated to them, among gold jewellery, refined bronze armour with sculpted bronze face of a warrior goddess, grinning masks, painted ostrich eggs, glass vases, terracotta statues, amphorae and sophisticated beetle-jewellery.

The exhibition curated by Alfonsina Russo, director of the archaeological park of the Colosseum, links the events of the two cities and their battle for the dominion of the seas, won by Rome in the battle of the Egadi. With the Punic wars (from 264 BC to 146 BC) Rome annihilated Carthage. The end of the second marked the end of the Carthaginian power while with the third Publius Cornelius Scipio Emilianus destroyed the city. “In this path, from the 9th century BC, from the Phoenician origins to the Roman colony in the 6th century AD, we want to overcome the stereotypes that the modern world has given to Carthage – says Russo – still seen today as otherness, the enemy Going beyond the Punic wars and highlighting the articulated political and commercial relations and the complementary role of these two naval powers, decisive for the Mediterranean “.

The most recent excavations (from the Egadi unpublished finds, result of the commitment of the Superintendency of the Sicilian Sea) and the research of the last decades (the exhibition is dedicated to the archaeologist Sebastiano Tusa and to the scholar Paolo Bernardini, both missing), have started a different reflection, retracing the process of Romanisation of the Mediterranean, between rich commercial and cultural exchanges, bloody wars and the Iulia Cartagho colony, a city with rich buildings and mosaics. In this fresco the exhibition unfolds, divided into four parts, from the eastern origins, the Phenicia and its cities, to the Colosseum and the Roman Forum, in the Temple of Romulus the Carthaginian domination and the cultural exchange are told while in the Imperial Ramp it is reached to the Roman colony Iulia Carthago. To welcome visitors the reconstruction of the Moloch of the Cabiria film of 1914, a deity-monster in reality never venerated by the Carthaginians.

Find out how you can visit these amazing locations with us at Bellarome Italian Adventures.