During the principate of Augustus, Italy was reorganised and unified in political and administrative terms, as well as culturally, religiously and linguistically. From as early as 32 BCE, the Princeps was able to refer in his memoirs to Tota Italia, the peninsula perceived as a single geographical, cultural and political entity, bound by oath and which fought at his side. This first unification of Italy, accelerated by the traumatic phases of the Social War in the First Century BCE, was the consequence of a long-term phenomenon.
Over the centuries – at times violently, at others less traumatically – Rome gradually assimilated the various peoples of the peninsula, from the Po Valley to the Sicilian Channel, within its sphere of influence. The cultures of these peoples, often interconnected yet recognisable and distinguishable from one another, were open to contact with the Greek world and the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as with the Celtic and Central European areas. While Rome guaranteed respect for their differences, the peoples attracted by alliances or subjected by force gradually assumed increasingly uniform traits, through a dynamic involving the Romanisation of languages, laws, cults, ways of life, trading, burying and honouring the dead.
With a selection of highly representative works, the exhibition portrays these dynamics regarding the contact and transformation of the various Italic cultures, following the entire process from the Fourth Century BCE up until the Augustan Era, beginning with the variegated mosaic of peoples and cultures that had formed in the Italian peninsula since the Iron Age and retracing the stages of the progressive construction of an Italic – and then fully Roman – identity.
The funeral customs, with their plurality of forms and practices, the languages, initially differing even alphabetically and subsequently uniformed through Latinisation, the cults, highly identifying and linked to local traditions yet gradually absorbed and integrated into the religion of Rome, constitute the first major thematic nucleus of the exhibition.
A specific space has been devoted to the wars fought on land and sea – key points in the aforementioned process – as well as to relations with the culture and influence of Hellenism.
The second part of the exhibition illustrates the organisational struggle undertaken by Rome to transform from a city-state into a single territorial entity divided into colonies and municipia, in which the religion, luxury, traits and images of a new era accompany the visitor towards Augustan Italy. Through the orderliness of its cities, the organised network of its streets, the administrative geometrization of the countryside and the borders of the individual regiones created by the Princeps, this entity anticipated and shaped what has become the Italy of today.