The ruined palace of the Roman emperor Nero is being reopened to the public today Thursday in Rome after twenty years of restoration work.

Culture ministers from thirteen European Union countries and the Italian president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, are attending the opening ceremony.

The one-hundred-and-fifty-room palace was called the Golden House because of the amount of gold leaf which adorned much of it.

The restoration work is still far from complete, and only one-fifth of the rooms so far restored can be visited.

But the BBC Rome correspondent says that, for the first time, visitors will get a unique impression of ancient Rome in the first century of the first millennium.