The Capitoline Museum was the site of Gucci’s Cruise 2020 fashion show on May 28.
Gucci Cruise shows under creative director Alessandro Michele regularly pay homage to classical cultures, antiquity and oft-neglected histories.
Last year, the site for Michele’s Gucci Cruise 2019 show was the Promenade Des Alyscamps in Arles, the Roman necropolis in southern France.
In 2017, the designer’s Gucci Cruise 2018 show was held closer to home, in the Palatine Gallery at Pitti Palace, Florence, which showcases impressive Renaissance and Baroque art.
Some areas of the Capitoline Hill have been seriously neglected over the years and Gucci plans to restore panoramic vistas – which are inaccessible because of overgrown vegetation – and open them for viewing within two years.
This includes the modular restoration and reorganisation of the Belvedere Garden at Villa Tarpea, as well as the green areas surrounding the cliff, by 2020.
For naturalists, the Tarpea Rock is significant because of its composition; the cliff comprises mostly porous tufa rock, which hosts diverse flora, and has been carved and reshaped over centuries.
The historic cultural importance of the Tarpea rock face veers on the morbid. It was recorded that in the first century AD people who were considered traitors of the Roman empire were sentenced to death by being thrown off the cliffside to the Roman Forum situated below.
The Roman Forum is a rectangular-shaped forum or plaza surrounded by the ruins of ancient Rome’s most important government sites. Symbolically, throwing the criminals to their deaths onto the plaza meant they were expelled from Roman society.
The Tarpea Rock cultural project is not Gucci’s first foray into large-scale conservation.
Last year Gucci teamed up with local organisations and government ministries for the restoration of the Boboli Gardens in Florence.
Gucci donated €2 million over three years for the Primavera di Boboli project.
The brand has also worked to preserve and bring attention to historic archaeological parks in Pompeii, Herculaneum and Selinunte in Sicily through conservation projects and fashion campaigns.
For Gucci’s pre-autumn 2019 campaign, images of Gucci models posed against the ruins of the Selinunte temples, offering a dramatic juxtaposition of contemporary eccentricity and classical antiquity.
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