In the first volume of America’s Rome, a magisterial overview of the Eternal City’s sway over New World imaginations, William Vance writes: “The function of a museum of art, not as a school for the artist but as a special place set apart for the experience and worship of Beauty by the ordinary man or woman, is something that could be realized by Americans in the nineteenth century only through their visits to London, Paris, Munich, Florence, Naples and—especially—Rome.” Generations of travelers have tried to describe how art, architecture and ambiance come together in, for example, Rome’s Capitoline Museums, especially in the room where two touchstone sculptures are displayed—the Dying Gaul (a marble Roman copy of a Pergamon bronze) and the Satyr Resting (a replica of an original by Praxiteles and the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun, published in 1860). In The Portrait of a Lady (1881) Henry James places his heroine in that room, surrounded by statues: “The Roman air is an exquisite medium…The golden sunshine mingles with them, the deep stillness of the past, so vivid yet…seems to throw a solemn spell…The dark red walls of the room threw them into relief; the polished marble floor reflected their beauty.” The Metropolitan Museum was born of that era and the American yearning for culture. Now New York has its own magical space for the contemplation of antiquities, with the long-awaited completion of the galleries for classical art. The heart of the new Roman galleries is the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court, a barrel-vaulted central atrium flooded with natural light that seems able to absorb multitudes of tourists, school groups, sketchers and city dwellers with unforced grace. There is, above all, a sense of continuity: in the flow of the architectural spaces, in the historical clarity with which the perennial relevance of the classical heritage is maintained, in the way the now-completed southernmost wing fulfills the teleology of the museum.