Ardea (30km south of Rome on Via Ardeatina, in the volcanic Alban Hills coastal plain, an area of drained marshland and ancient volcanic rock that was the territory of the Rutuli in the Virgilian mythology of Aeneas's Italian wars) is simultaneously one of the oldest inhabited sites in Lazio (Bronze Age settlement documented, Iron Age continuation, the Rutuli city that appears in Book VII of the Aeneid as the capital of King Turnus. Aeneas's Italian antagonist) and the site of the most important single-artist museum in the Roman coastal area: the Museo Manzù (the collection of works by Giacomo Manzù, 1908-1991, the most celebrated Italian sculptor of the 20th century after Marino Marini, whose work in bronze combines the specific classical tradition of Italian figurative sculpture with the 20th-century formal reduction that makes it simultaneously ancient and modern).
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Ardea: Key Sites
Museo Manzù
The Museo Manzù (Via Laurentina 217, Ardea, in the house and studio where Giacomo Manzù lived and worked in his final decades, now the State museum of his work) contains the largest single-collection of Manzù's bronzes, pastels, and prints: the Gates of Death (the door cast for Saint Peter's in Rome, the museum has the full-scale bronze panels that were rejected from the Vatican commission and replaced by the surviving simplified version), the Cardinal series (the seated cardinals in their ceremonial robes, the most internationally recognized Manzù subject), and the figures of women and children that constitute his mature figurative work. Manzù's specific significance: his friendship with Pope John XXIII (the only Italian 20th-century sculptor whose work was directly commissioned for Saint Peter's, the Door of Death, 1964) and his political trajectory (from socialist-influenced figurative sculpture to the specific Italian post-war cultural position) make him the most historically located Italian sculptor of his century.
Q&A: Ardea
Is the Museo Manzù worth the visit from Rome?
For visitors interested in 20th-century Italian sculpture: yes, unequivocally. The museum is rarely crowded (it receives approximately 15,000 visitors per year, remarkable undervisitation for a collection of this quality), the setting (the artist's actual studio and garden) provides the specific intimacy that museum installations rarely achieve, and the bronze work in particular benefits from seeing the full-scale rejected Vatican panels that explain the Vatican compromise. Combined with the Ardea ancient site walk (the Bronze Age and Iron Age traces on the volcanic rock promontory above the modern town) for a half-day.
