The Exhibition ‘Rome and the Barbarians, the birth of a new world’ has been inaugurated: it is a marvellous exhibition collecting more than 2000 objects, coming from more than 23 countries, some of which have left their original placing for the first time, and it is the greatest exposition which has ever been organized in Europe.
Francois Pinault, the President of Palace Grassi, which has come back, by this exhibition, to the splendour of the era FIAT, invites us ‘‘to meditate on the current situation in Europe, a political and cultural country which has ruled the world and which nowadays is expected to face the exigency of learning to live together a more and more copious number of women and men coming from other parts of the world. That’s why we all have to remember our origins which are not only Greek or Christian: we all are a bit barbaric! And the aim of this exhibition is exactly that of removing the negative glow from the word ‘barbaric’ that derives from the Greek, actually suggesting somebody unrelated to one’s own cultural universe.
The Barbarians and the Romans found the way of merging perfectly giving birth to our civilization’’.
By going round the rooms, more than 3000 square metres of treasures, statues, jewellery, arms, objects of common use, such as belts, buckles, pots and spectacular manuscripts, you have the opportunity to go back over about a millennium of European history, that is a crucial period for the identity of the European continent that too often celebrates Greek or Hebraic- Christian roots, forgetting its own so powerful and  important barbaric origins.

Tania Danieli