In two rooms of Palazzo Clementino in the Musei Capitolini, next to the Medagliere, a precious selection of over 660 polychrome marbles from the Imperial age from the Collezione Capitolina and the Fondazione Dino ed Ernesta Santarelli. Thanks to a ten-year free loan, the exhibition offers a view of the immense quantity of stones imported to Rome: a unique opportunity to retrace, through shapes, colours and patterns, the millennial history of the capital from an artistic but also socio-cultural, political and economic point of view. The use of polychrome marble was a key feature of Roman architecture in the imperial age.

The exhibition is divided into two rooms. In the first room there are 82 polychrome fragments from the Santarelli Foundation; the other houses two pairs of samples, one from the early 19th century with 422 pieces, also from the Foundation, and the other from the Collezione Capitolina, begun in the second half of the 19th century by the Gui family and consisting of 288 tiles. In the same room there is also a head of Dionysus mounted on an unrelated female bust (consisting of eight different types of marble and a selection of marble working tools from the Fiorentini workshop).

A documentary, curated by Adriano Aymonino and Silvia Davoli, is projected in a loop, tracing the history of these materials that arrived in Rome in relation to the expansion policy of the empire.