Everywhere is so rich in Roman history and the Roman empire,” he told the Guardian’s Angela Giuffrida. Oliver Vandermeereh, who visited on the final day of a six-day trip, was equally excited. “We always wondered why it was closed,” resident Sandro Lubattelli, a retired computer engineer, told the Times from the site. When the attraction officially opened to humans yesterday, locals and tourists alike expressed their enthusiasm. In recent years, the site only accommodated feline visitors hundreds of stray cats have taken refuge there.
Caesar death series#
The move is just the latest in a series of high-profile partnerships between the city and big brands in recent years for instance, the fashion house Fendi sponsored a multimillion dollar renovation of Rome’s Trevi fountain in 2015. Plans to open the site began a few years ago, when the Italian fashion house Bulgari donated a little over $1 million for the project, reported Chris Leadbeater of the Telegraph in 2019. But due to a lack of resources, the entire area remained closed. It was rediscovered during excavations in the square in the 1920s, when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini “razed many sections of modern Rome to unearth the archaeology underneath,” hoping to “tangibly tie his dictatorship to the might of the Roman Empire,” as Smithsonian magazine’s Jason Daley wrote in 2019. These efforts also revealed four ancient temples at the site. Augustus closed the site where Caesar was murdered. The assassination led to years of civil war, and Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian, who took the name Augustus, ultimately came to power. Previously, tourists could only view the archaeological site from street level.Īt the time of his death, Caesar was ruling as a dictator, and the group of senators who killed him feared his growing power. In reality, Caesar was stabbed to death in the Curia of Pompey, a structure built by one of Caesar's contemporaries, the Roman statesman Pompey the Great. The playwright’s version isn’t a historical record, and it takes liberties with certain details, including the location.Īrchaeologist Monica Ceci, who oversees the site, acknowledges that visitors “may have a hard time imagining, because the Shakespearean drama induces you to think that the murder was in the forum,” she tells the Times. In the popular imagination, the story of Caesar’s assassination has long been influenced by Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, written around 1599. Roberto Gualtieri, the mayor of Rome, said at a ceremony earlier this week that the attraction will add “tremendous value to a city that never ceases to amaze with its treasures and wonders,” per the New York Times’ Elisabetta Povoledo. And now, for the first time, it’s officially open to visitors. The ancient site is known as the Sacred Area of Largo di Torre Argentina.
Historians would lose track of the area in the centuries that followed, only rediscovering it in the early 20th century. Following Julius Caesar’s murder in 44 B.C.E., the Roman emperor Augustus condemned the scene of the crime as a locus sceleratus, a cursed place.
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