Giovanni Barracco was born in 1829 in Isola Capo Rizzuto, in Ionian Calabria, the eighth of twelve children of a noble family of ancient origins. From the documents of the family archives, it appears that the property had reached 30,000 hectares in 1868, including a territory that went from Crotone to the center of the Sila Grande. The friendship with Giuseppe Fiorelli, the great archaeologist who became director of the excavations of Pompeii and of the Archaeological Museum of Naples, which lasted all his life, introduced him to the love for archeology and ancient art. His personal collection, wisely collected to form a "museum of comparative ancient sculpture", includes Egyptian, Assyrian, Phoenician, Cypriot, Etruscan, Greek and Roman works of art, up to a few examples of medieval art. In 1902, with a gesture of great liberality, Barracco decided to donate the entire collection of sculptures, which now numbered almost two hundred works, to the Municipality of Rome: in exchange he had the availability of a building area at the end of Corso Vittorio Emanuele. II, where the road leads to the Lungotevere. On this land Barracco had a small neoclassical building built on a project by Gaetano Koch with the façade designed, according to the fashion of the time, as an Ionic temple, on whose pediment the inscription MVSEO DI SCVLTVRA ANTICA stood out.