The Eternal City’s celebration of the second millennium of the death of the Emperor Augustus in that month that takes his name proceeded this week with the formal opening to visitors of newly restored rooms in
his palace and of the stunningly renovated Palatine Museum. Augustus
was the emperor who famously said, according to Suetonius, that, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” Today we can say that the archaeological team found an inchoate mass of ruins and left it vastly improved.