Building a Masterpiece: Trajan's Column

Designed to celebrate the Emperor Trajan's military victories in Dacia, the column is also a monument to the technological and building skills of the Roman world. The exhibition allows visitors to track the journey of the huge marble blocks that make up the column from the quarries in Luni at an altitude of 800 metres to the Portus Romae – a voyage of some 200 nautical miles – and from there up the Tiber to the heart of the imperial capital. The engineers tasked with raising the column had to cope with considerable weight issues, each of the seventeen drums weighing between 20 and 30 tonnes and the capital surmounting the completed work weighing roughly 40 tonnes. The column was inaugurated in Trajan's Forum on 12 May in the year 113 AD, its immense popularity serving as a source of inspiration for artists and architects well into the 19th century. The exhibition will be showcasing dozens of works from Italy's leading archaeological museums, in addition to scale models and life-size models specially created for the occasion illustrating the complex procedures involved in transporting the blocks and slabs, and the various phases involved in carving and erecting the column on site.

The exhibition is curated by Giovanni De Pasquale and Fabrizio Paolucci.

See the Hypervision "Following in Trajan's footsteps" , a virtual exhibition on the precious relics and unique items from the reign of Trajan present in the Uffizi collections

Visit the siteweb dedicated to the exhibition