The Museo Barraco consists of a prestigious collection of antique sculpture – art from Assyria, Egypt, Cyprus, Phoenicia, Etruria, Greece and Rome – which Giovanni Barracco, a wealthy nobleman of Calabria, gave to the Municipality of Rome in 1904. Baron Barracco had dedicated his life to collecting such pieces, some acquired from antiques’ merchants, others recovered from the excavations which, at the end of the nineteenth century, marked the urban transformation of Rome as the capital of Italy.