The Official Dinner, open to accompanying persons, will take place at the Sapienza Classical Art Museum (Gipsoteca) and will start at 7 p.m.
Participants will be free to hang around the classical statues of the museum. They will enjoy a complete dinner from appetizers to desserts with typical Italian and Roman dishes. Dinner will be accompanied by a musical group. The museum, affiliated to the Department of Ancient Sciences, is located at the back of the building of the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy in the main campus of Sapienza University.
The foundation of the La Sapienza University Gipsoteca dates back to 1889 thanks to Emanuel Lowy, professor of the first chair of Archeology and Art History in Italy.
Professor Lowy wanted to make available to his students a collection (originals and copies) of Greek and Roman sculpture casts. In this way he intended to connect with the tradition of German university gypsum libraries, in which the casts had become means of historical representation of the different phases of ancient art: The first university collections had arisen in Germany since the second half of the eighteenth century, and at the end of the nineteenth century collections of casts were present in all major universities of Europe and America.
The Museum, today, has a collection of about twelve hundred plaster casts, which reproduce existing Greek and Hellenistic sculptures in museums and collections from all over the world; the exhibition in chronological order allows students and visitors to concretely illustrate the historical development of Greek and Hellenistic sculptures.
The entrance hall welcomes the public with the cast of the colossal Kouros of Samo (circa 570 a. D.). The Gipsoteca shows casts from the Minoan and Mycenaean period to the classical Greek and Hellenistic period and a collection of gemstone imprints made by Tommaso Cades between 1829 and 1834.
