 The main goal of the project I'm working on, and in this occasion I'm going to speak about, is the reconstruction of all the events characterizing the Volkonsky collection. The chosen title from the museum back to the collection wants to summarize the fundamental idea. In fact, the study of this antiquities collection should necessarily have started from today's museum exhibition going backwards. Nowadays, Villa Volkonsky, is the official residence of the British ambassador to Italy in Rome, and it had always housed in its garden hundreds of Roman antiquities, which, however, in the last decades were in an almost neglected state, hidden by the garden vegetation. In 2011, 360 marbles of the Volkonsky collection were restored. For reason of conservation, most of the antiquities have been moved from the garden and placed in two 19th century greenhouses, named the Volkonsky Greenhouses Museum. This small museum, kind of museum, is under quest open to the public, and an almost complete online catalogue is available through the database of the German Archeological Institute Aracne. The Villa Volkonsky collection is still unexplored territory, with only a very limited number of published marbles. The artifacts still preserved today, more than 400, include six funeral portraits, about 70 sarcophagi in tektor fragmentif, of course, I'm showing you just some pictures, 100 fragments of various sased statues, 155 architectural elements, eight funeral altars, and about 100 inscriptions. Moreover, these antiquities represent various period of ancient art, from the late Roman republican period to the early Middle Ages. As I said, the Museum of the British Embassy can tell us a long story reach of events, since the marble were collected from the beginning of the 19th century. In 1829, the Russian princess in Ida Volkonsky, disillusioned with Russia under Tsar Nicholas I, decided to move to Rome. The history of the villa as such began in 1830, when the princess, a woman of great culture, purchased a vineyard on the Sillian Hill, which included 36 arches of the aqueduct of Nero. Zinaida Volkonsky transformed the vineyard into an English garden, where she built a summer house and displayed fragments of Roman marbles in the scenic backdrop of the arches of the aqueduct. The garden became an attraction for visiting artists and writers, including Gogol, Turgenev, and Sir Walter Scott. However, very little is known about Zinaida Volkonsky's collection. A proper family archive does not exist, even if some documents mostly useful for the family history are now kept at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Necessarily the research has been carried on through other ways, such as descriptions or images. For instance, Fanny Mendelssohn, sister of the famous composer, described in a letter to her family, the princess garden in 1840, I quote, through the garden landways run ruins of an aqueduct, which they have to account in various ways, building steps outside arches, putting seats at the top and filling vacant places in the ivy mantel walls with statues and busts. Roses climbs up as high they can find support, and always Indian fig trees and palms run wild among capitals and columns, ancient vases and fragment of all kind, end quote. This description is interesting, allowing us to imagine how should be displayed the collection. Today we have just some few preserved elements, which suggested the romantic idea of the English garden, such as a gigantic marble hand set into the aqueduct's wall, or the small grottoes formed from the aqueduct's buried lower arches. Unfortunately, it is not possible without an inventory to define which antiquities were part of this first stage of the collection, but I would like to stress on the idea that the prince was an aware collector of antiquities, even though she was never been considered in this way. She was very fond of art, and it is hard to believe that all the marbles were being only accidentally found in the villa's grounds. Among the several clues supporting this assumption, my favorite is a quote from a Zenidas letter to a friend, to a Russian friend, written immediately after her moving to Italy, and I quote. My first letter is dated from Pompeii. I repeat my invitation, come to Italy, the sea shortens distances, come and collect marbles, lava, memories, poetry, above all, come and reflect under this cloudless sky, end of quote. The Volkonsky collection represents a perfect case study of 19th-century collecting in Rome. It is significant that the collection came together at a fairly late date, later than grand tour collections. During this period, Nuburgos, or noble foreign collectors, joined or replaced the older papal aristocracy. The princess made her own aesthetic and decorative choice, and she probably took advantage of her connections, which by the way were many, to find the best artifacts at the time when Rome had already been plundered for antiquities. When Zinaida died in 1862, Arsene Alexander inherited the property. He was a Russian diplomat, served in Dresden and later in Madrid, but despite his work, he continued to consider Rome as his home and look after the villa. He commissioned, in fact, the architect Joachino Erzok, to embellish the garden, and during his work, 1866, the well-preserved columbarium of the freedmen Tiberius Claudius Vitalis was discovered. Alexander was interested in the discovery and asked the formal permission to pursue the excavation and the restoration of the monument. At that time, the prince increased the number of inscriptions, including the new epitaphs coming from the columbarium. It is also known that Alexander bought antiquities from the antiquarian Lorenzo Fortunati, who personally carried on excavations in some property outside Rome. As for Zinaide, Alexander had several relationships with scholars or antiquities dealers, and his contribution increased the collection. He also made some changes in the garden, rearranging part of the display. After Alexander's death, 1878, his adopted daughter, Nadeide, inherited the property and married Marquesa Vladimiro Kampanari. Kampanari family built a new mansion, but around the property a massive urbanization began, involving the loss of part of the garden. Significant excavations preceded this work, bringing to light funerary monuments, mosaics, marbles, that in some cases became part of the Volkanski collection, and in other cases enriched the National Museum of Rome, as known thanks to the archival documentation. The study of these excavations reveals the archeological provenance of certain finds in the collection, as, for example, the grave reliefs with portrait of the Servile family, or the epitaph of Bebi. These are the only preserved evidences of the destroyed funeral monuments. In the Antike Bildwerke in Rome by Friedrich Matz and Friedrich von Duon, 1881, 1882, we can read the description of several Volkanski antiquities. It represents an important document attesting also the loss of several marbles, no longer kept in the collection, probably sold or stolen. In addition to this, there is also the importance of some descriptions, such as the one of the Atenapartenos statue, one of the most remarkable marble of the collection. Thanks to the historical documentation, we can understand the statue's progressive state of preservation. At the end of 19th century, Matz Duon and other scholars describe the Atena statue completed by a head and mother arms. This is the only until now known picture of the still restored statue. A French traveler took this photo with some others of the villa at the beginning of the 20th century, and I have found this in an antique shop. This other picture, kept at the photographic archive of the German Archaeological Institute, shows how all the statues, restorations were removed at least before 1931, the picture's date. After this aside and going back to chronological descriptions of the events, the Campanari family moved to Russia in the early 20th century, and the villa was rented out in 1922. They sold the property, with its full collection of antiquities, to the German government for use as the new German embassy. During the German years, 1922-1945, it is clear that there was not a great interest in the collection, and the Italian government was able to have, as a gift, at least two statues of the collection to exhibit in the Roman National Museum. In the early 30s, some scholars took pictures of Sarkova Gaia in the garden, already almost hidden in the vegetation. At the end of the Second World War, the villa was placed under the Allied Control Commission. In 1947, the Italian government made it available to the British government to use as a temporary embassy, after the former embassy at Rome's Portapia was destroyed in a terroristic attack. Interest returned when the villa became the British embassy, and the collection was expanded. For instance, the statue musical satyr, which during the later restoration works in 2011 was reassembled from 15 fragments separately displayed in various places of the garden, was not part of the Volkonsky collection, but it was in the former English embassy. This statue was found during some excavations carried by the diplomat and antiquarian Sir John Seville. Many photographs show the collection during the years as just the decorative embellishment of the embassy. Slowly, as I said, the marble started to be forgotten and hidden by the vegetation. Not without reason, in certain publication of the 70s, some Volkonsky statues and Sarkova Gaia were believed as lost. After many years of oblivion, we arrived to the current museum exhibition. As it has been said, the story of the Volkonsky greenhouse museum allows us to take long travel through time, from Roman republican age barials, to the salon of the Russian aristocracy in Rome, from the Second World War to the post-war years and up to the present days. Thank you.