Behind a scaffolded facade on Via dei Fori Imperiali, the Villa Silvestri Rivaldi keeps one of Rome's more peculiar art-historical secrets: a cycle of monumental mythological frescoes — gods, goddesses, battle scenes, zodiac signs — painted for Eurialo Silvestri in the mid-1500s, then plastered flat by the Conservatory of the Mendicant Spinsters, who found bare flesh on a chapel-adjacent wall unacceptable.

The Istituto Centrale per il Restauro is now peeling back those layers, exposing colour that survives in oranges, yellows and greens, plus a Jupiter whose pose quotes Michelangelo's Last Judgement. Because the building later housed a girls' school, textile workshops, squatters and community arts projects, the walls read as a palimpsest — Renaissance invention, counter-reformation erasure and 20th-century graffiti on…