The new Greek and Roman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which open April 20, suggest something about the limits of nostalgia trips. I’ve spent years wishing that the raucous eatery in the elegant McKim, Mead, and White–designed courtyard might be returned to its earlier incarnation as a peaceful restaurant surrounding a pool with Carl Milles’s funky bronze figures. With its new name, the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court, and newly reconstructed space, the Met is attempting to use its past to look forward.

At more than 30,000 square feet, the new series of 11 exhibition spaces continues the sequence of eight previously renovated galleries devoted to earlier Greek art, south of the Great Hall on the Met’s first floor. (The earlier projects were completed between 1996 and 2000.) The $220 million cost includes renovations on the upper and lower floors that will eventually benefit the education and Islamic art facilities as well. Visitors can now systematically follow the developments in Greek and Roman art from the prehistoric, through the glories of classical Greece, into the Roman Empire at its height and toward its decline. Moreover, there is now space to display some 6,000 works that had previously been in storage.

Those familiar with the collection will also welcome back their own favorites, many of which have been absent from public view for some time. Mine is the Cubiculum from Boscoreale, near Pompeii and buried in the Vesuvian eruption of 79 C.E. It brings us amazingly close to the experience of being in a real Roman interior: a bedroom to match the elegance of the Met’s neighbors across the street. Formerly incongruously set in a niche in the Great Hall, the room now relates to contemporaneous objects and paintings, including a pair of Odysseus frescoes. No later illustrations of Homer’s tale can compete with that doleful oneeyed Polyphemus shown here.

It’s easy to forget how engaging these ancient collections can be. The Met’s attempt to jog our memories reflects the work of curators who can put themselves in the place of the museum visitor — a rare occurrence. The galleries are filled with objects that beckon the visitor with a sort of come-hither visual chemistry, so often missing from similar installations. The socalled Hellenistic Treasury, for example, is a small gallery with small-scaled objects, nicely tucked into a corner, but it’s not the dark space with pinpoint spots that we’re accustomed to seeing in other treasuries. Here, as in all of the new exhibition spaces, there’s daylight, with windows that look out to Central Park or Fifth Avenue.

The play between scale dissonances is one of the problems that is often unresolved in this kind of encyclopedic museum, which — unlike the purpose-built and brilliantly restored Getty Villa in Los Angeles — must serve during many generations for many kinds of art. Despite that challenge, there’s a comfortable equilibrium in the way so many works of different scale sit in that vast Court space, which visitors enter by walking around the familiar gigantic Sardis column (Greek, third century).

While proclaimed as a “museum within a museum,” the new galleries are really not quite that daunting. The renovated spaces are manageable and — unlike antiquities displays in most museums — won’t scare off the uninitiated. At more than 30,000, there’s a lot to see, but not so much that tourists won’t have time to see other parts of the museum. And there’s plenty to keep the locals coming back, such as the mercifully concise coin gallery, which deals with coinage in relation to Roman emperors, and the Etruscan art and Greek and Roman study collection galleries on the mezzanine.

It’s reassuring to think that someone actually wanted to help me look at Greek and Roman art without making me feel intellectually crippled. That empowering mode is not always at work in our museums, since the art world likes being closed to the unwashed (except when it comes to asking for admission fees). But under Philippe de Montebello’s direction, the Met has continually moved in the direction of opening up without dumbing down. The opening of these new galleries is an auspicious advance in that tradition.

The big message that’s always lurking somewhere, but never in evidence, is about provenance: Do any of these antiquities sit in those daylit rooms under an unseen cloud? The Met’s involvement with antiquities goes back to its founding in 1870, a time when antiquities collections were a required foundation for any respectable art collection. (How things have changed.) When the current Met buildings opened in 1880, the Cesnola Collection of Cypriot antiquities was one of its most celebrated features. But just as attitudes have changed in regard to what and how to display, so too have sensibilities about the sources of all those treasures held by museums: whether they were legally acquired, how they left their country of origin, and the museum’s responsibility in acknowledging these issues, which are the stuff of constant press reports.

Is there a way in which museums can address some of these issues with candor? In the new galleries, we’re informed about restoration of certain parts of a work; many object labels nicely distinguish between dates precisely determined by scholars (e.g., 50–40 B.C.E.) and those that might span centuries (e.g., first century B.C.E. –first century C.E.). So why not respect the intelligence of the museum visitor by addressing, even if in some defensive way, the museum’s role in the international antiquities market, and the ongoing debate between archaeologists and curators on the ethics involved in matters such as looting and preservation and scholarship?

I’m not sure whether there’s metaphoric meaning in that I visited the new Greek and Roman Galleries on an overcast day. If only letting the sun shine on these collections were as simple as a change in the weather.