Centrale Montemartini

Museum · OstienseRome,Italy

Rome's first public power station, left with its engines and turbine in place and ancient marble gods set among them.

Centrale Montemartini puts Roman marble gods between the diesel engines of a power station, and neither has been moved out of the other's way. Two enormous engines fill the upper hall and a steam turbine runs the length of the hall below. A goddess stands with a flywheel behind her, a pediment of gods lies along a wall of riveted steel plate, and rows of portrait heads sit on plinths under the overhead cranes. The station's own fittings are still in place too: gauges, valve wheels, painted signs, a control panel with its levers. It stands south of the centre in Ostiense, Rome's oldest industrial district. This was the first public power station the city ever built, and it ran until 1963, when keeping it going stopped being worth the money. Nothing was stripped out afterwards, which is why you are walking through a plant rather than a hall dressed up as one. The sculpture arrived later, and the arrangement was made permanent in 2005. Neither side has been tidied to suit the other. In the boiler hall a Roman hunting mosaic from a rich house lies flat at ground level, so you walk alongside it rather than over it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come early or late for an almost empty museum — sculpture of this quality would draw a queue in any other city, and you can usually walk the whole building without waiting behind anybody.
Shoot low and include the machinery — a marble on its own here looks like a marble anywhere, and the whole point is the engine standing behind it.
Start upstairs in the engine hall — the two diesel engines are the biggest objects in the building, and everything downstairs makes more sense once you have seen them.
The hunting mosaic is about capture, not killing — gazelles, bears and boar are being taken alive for the games; fifteen metres of it came out of the Esquiline in 1903.

Things to do

1
Stand between the two diesel engines
The upper hall holds a pair of engines the size of small houses, painted, riveted and complete. Walk into the gap between them and look down their length. Ancient statues stand in a row along the sides of the engines at floor level, so you see the marble and the machinery at the same time.
2
Walk the row of temple figures set against the machines
In one of the halls, the marble figures from a temple front are mounted in a long row against the machinery. Walk the whole line without cutting across it: the gods are arranged as they stood in the triangle above the columns, and the rivets behind them are from 1912.
3
Find the pope's train in the second boiler hall
One bay of the second boiler hall was cleared to hold three carriages built in France in 1858 as a gift to Pius IX. Walk down the side of them: a balcony car he blessed crowds from, a throne room with a small apartment behind it, and a consecrated chapel where he said mass on the move.