JAMES FRANCO READS GABRIELE TINTI POETRY AT ARA PACIS

Summary:

• Actor James Franco was scheduled to read poems by Gabriele Tinti at the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome on Saturday, October 3.
• The poems respond to the relief of Aeneas Sacrificing to the Penates on the front of the monument.
• The reading is the final live installment of Tinti's poetic residency across the Musei in Comune, supported by Cinecittà and The Rome Edition.

Actor James Franco was scheduled to read poems by Gabriele Tinti at the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome on Saturday, October 3, at 5:00 PM. The Musei in Comune of Rome announced the program. Tinti wrote the verses in response to the relief of Aeneas Sacrificing to the Penates, which you find on the front of the monument.

Cinecittà supported the reading, and The Rome Edition acted as hospitality partner. The evening is the final live installment of a project Tinti designed as a poetic residency. The project treats the Musei in Comune as living spaces where voice, body and poetry serve as tools for exploring the collections.

The Ara Pacis dates to a decision by the Senate to honor Augustus, the princeps who returned victorious and opened a period of prosperity. According to the Res Gestae, the senators decreed a sacrifice by magistrates, priests and Vestal Virgins. The ritual involved a substitutionary and expiatory sacrifice, the alba victima, meant to appease the god Mars and secure the pax romana. The organizers describe Franco's performance as a reflection on celebration and foundational violence, and on the tension beneath an image of harmony. They present this reading as a way to restore complexity to a monument often seen as purely celebratory.

Tinti says he composed the poems as prayers, following the invocation Virgil gives Aeneas in Book VIII of the Aeneid. He links the founding of human cities to the sacrifice of an animal victim, and he draws on the imagery of the relief to address Rome and the endurance of myth today.

The reading belongs to a wider project by Tinti centered on masterworks of art. Past participants include actors Willem Dafoe, Kevin Spacey, Malcolm McDowell and Abel Ferrara. Earlier venues include The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum and LACMA in Los Angeles, the British Museum in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Archaeological Park of the Colosseum, Pompeii and the Pantheon.

Antonio Saccone, president of Cinecittà, described the project as a meeting of the city's shape, sculpture, painting, poetry and cinema, built on Rome's mythology.