John Hooper in Rome
The job of safeguarding cultural treasures, said Eugenio La Rocca, picking his words with exquisite care, “needs to be carried out without clamour, though we never intended to turn it into a clandestine activity”.
There again, anyone might proceed with caution if he were admitting to the world that he had taken away some of Rome’s best-loved works of art and replaced them with copies made of the same material as false teeth.
The truth is out. For six years the Rome city council, whose heritage department La Rocca heads, has been spiriting away tombs, statues and busts and replacing them with plastic fakes.
Those who fear it could be the first step towards the Eternal City becoming a replica of itself will not be reassured to learn that the author of the copies, Romolo Felice (58), began his trade as a special effects man on the film Ben Hur.
Felice, his son and three brothers-in-law have turned out a stream of reproductions so good that no one has noticed the absence of the originals. They are responsible for two ersatz sarcophagi near the entrance to the gardens of the Villa Pamphilj, a phoney Venus in the grounds of the Villa Celimontana on the Caelian Hill and a host of bogus statues and busts dotted around the 16th-century Villa Aldobrandini.
It has also emerged that, when the Museo Borghese was reopened amid much hullaballoo last year, all the sculptures gracing the courtyard had been replaced with reproductions.
The elegant neo-classical nudes, said one official, are “so faithful to the original that already thieves have taken them for real, decapitated one to make off with the head and tried to carry away another.”
Theft is merely one of the reasons the council felt it had to act. Pollution, vandalism and erosion by rain have all taken a severe toll.
Carla Benocci of the council’s heritage department told the newspaper La Repubblica, which unveiled the ploy: “There is no alternative to copies if one wants to conserve monuments.
“Those in the Aldobrandini gardens were in a striking state of decay.”
What was once the mansion of Pope Clement VIII now has five statues and three busts made of plastic, including well-known figures of Diana and Minerva. The originals are to be put on display in a museum being built in the grounds.
The council plans to replace hundreds of works of art which are currently at the mercy of the weather and the spray-can artist. Statues dating back to the 17th century are to be taken out of the gardens of the Villas Borghese, Torlonia, Celimontana, Sciarra and Pamphilj.