Site of Julius Caesar's Assassination Will Be Transformed Into Open-Air Museum
Next year, Rome’s ‘Largo di Torre Argentina'—a sunken square believed to be the site of Julius Caesar’s assassination—is set to open to the public for the first time. Renovation of the archaeological site, which houses the ruins of four Roman temples and the sprawling Theatre of Pompey, will begin next month and last for about a year. Currently, tourists can only view the area from street level.
On the Ides of March in 44 B.C., a group of Roman senators stabbed Caesar, who was by then ruling as a dictator, to death in the Curia of Pompey, a meeting hall in the larger theatre complex. Among the conspirators was Caesar’s good friend Marcus Junius Brutus—a betrayal referenced in William Shakespeare’s famed history play, which finds the dying statesman asking, “Et tu, Brute?” or “And you, Brutus?”
Today, tourists can still see part of the curia’s foundations, as well as the remains of other Roman buildings dated to the fourth through first centuries B.C. Workers demolishing medieval houses on the orders of Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini rediscovered the ancient square in 1926, notes Deutsche Welle; as Jason Daley explained for Smithsonian magazine in 2019, Mussolini “razed many sections of modern Rome to unearth the archaeology underneath [and] tangibly tie his dictatorship to the might of the Roman Empire.”
Visitors to the square, known informally as the Area Sacra, will also catch glimpses of furry faces: According to Andrea Smith of Lonely Planet, the ruins are home to hundreds of stray cats that are sterilized, fed and tended to by a private non-profit shelter. City officials say the planned renovation will not affect this “historic feline colony,” reports Brenda Haas for Deutsche Welle.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/site-julius-caesars-assassination-will-be-transformed-open-air-museum-180977536/