Head to Paris this summer to learn all about ancient Rome

It's a big year for anniversaries.

A century since the start of the first World War.  Three since the dawn of the Georgian era in England.  And 2000 years since the death of Augustus Caesar.

Historians, TV programmers and museum curators around the world are each trying to convince us that their event had a massive impact on our world.  The Augustan camp gives us Moi, Auguste, empereur du Rome at the Grand Palais in Paris until 13 July.  This collaboration between the Louvre and the Capitoline Museum in Rome looked so big as to be unmissable.  It's the one event I built our weekend around.  And big, it turned out to be.  If not in any other way, then certainly in size.

There's a point in this show where you've been through galleries on Augustus' political story, his family, religion, and an awful lot of sculpture, and you come into a gallery that opens up into a grand staircase flooded with natural light.  "A bit smaller than I expected, but a great show," I thought.  Before realising that this wasn't an exit, but an ascent, and we'd now continue through an additional series of galleries above the ones we'd just toured.  More religion, ways of death, everyday life and the Augustan home, politics and civic architecture in the colonies.

This wasn't the insight into the character of Augustus I imagined we might get from the title, but a retrospective of just about every aspect of Roman life and art during the man's reign.

If you, like me, read a constant diet of Roman history, and historical fiction, and are beguiled by everything about the time period, you will happily poke around here for at least 2.5 hours.  If you're less of a fanatic, then even with the excellent English audio guide (essential, since all of the labels are, of course, en francais) you might find yourself a bit bored.  My husband, history buff that he is, didn't find enough of a story to hold things together and hit the "too many statues" point about 2/3rds of the way through.

There are still enough highlights, however, to be worthy of anyone's attention.  The Augustus of Prima Porta, one of the best known of all representations of the great man, sets the stage in a stately first room, made more dramatic by a reproduction of the towering walls in Rome on which he inscribed his laws.  (French translation running behind the statue.)  I loved the circular gallery that surrounded me with portrait busts of the whole extended family.  Roman sculpture at that time went in for realism and each of these is distinctly individual.  Any reader of I, Claudius will be entranced at the characters come to life.  There's an extraordinary video of the Ara Pacis (the altar of peace, newly restored in Rome, but some bits brought here) that shows how it would have been vividly painted in its active days.  And the galleries upstairs displaying household items from Pompeii really are extraordinary, featuring a wide range of beautiful things in magnificent condition.  There's no individual item here that isn't both lovely, and interesting to inspect.

The exhibition's problem, I think, comes from its resolutely old-fashioned approach to display.  With the exception of that video, and an interesting room upstairs where they use projectors to create a Roman room around you, the decor of which keeps changing, this is a procession of grand objects, on static display, with prim labels beside them.  I thought of the day before, when a small show at Malmaison of the Empress Josephine's books and decorative objects on birds and flowers was made far more dramatic with the use of soundtrack, video and lighting.  There is little of that new approach here; perhaps the curators feared "dumbing down".

Even a change of wall colour would have helped.  The majority of the exhibition space is white.  White sculpture against white walls.  Wonder if there was a latin phrase for snow blindness?  Only the frescoes from the House of Livia, left, really stood out against this background.  A rich, jewel-toned background would have highlighted most of the artefacts so much more.  Instead, we seemed to be looking at the white, pristine world of Rome as imagined by the Victorians.  Rather than the lively, messy, colourful world that the Ara Pacis video showed us really existed.

I expected a concluding gallery or two that showed me the impact that Augustus and his age had on the world.  From Virgil's stories inspiring art to aspiring leaders studying political strategy to architects of important civic buildings pinching ideas.  If it was there, it was far too subtle.

And so I staggered out of the show, happy … but feeling a bit overdosed.  As if I'd eaten far too much, but none of it really adding up to a meal.  If you're going to make the trip to consume what this show puts before you, make sure that your taste is solidly Roman before you start.