Largo Argentina: Where Caesar Fell

Why is it significant?

Lean on the railing and look down into the sunken square below the traffic: four temples, a scatter of broken columns, a few umbrella pines, and a surprising number of cats asleep on the warm stone. Up here is modern Rome, with its buses and trams.

Key Facts

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Lean on the railing and look down into the sunken square below the traffic: four temples, a scatter of broken columns, a few umbrella pines, and a surprising number of cats asleep on the warm stone. Up here is modern Rome, with its buses and trams. Down there is the ground Julius Caesar knew... and the last place he ever walked to. These are temples of the Republic, older than any emperor, and archaeologists still label them simply A, B, C and D, because nobody can say for certain which gods lived in them. The round one, temple B, is usually linked to Fortuna, the goddess of luck. They came to light between 1926 and 1929, when a whole medieval neighbourhood was knocked down for new roads, and the planners found, instead, an ancient sacred square. Look past the round temple to the back, where a long block of tufa foundations runs behind the columns. That is part of the Curia of Pompey, a meeting hall attached to Pompey's great theatre complex. On the Ides of March, 44 BC, the Senate was sitting there, and Caesar walked in despite the warnings. The historian Suetonius counted twenty-three stab wounds. Plutarch says he fell at the foot of a statue of Pompey, the rival he had defeated. And this is where our walk really begins. Caesar's adopted heir was his great-nephew Octavian, just eighteen years old. Within seventeen years he had defeated the assassins, then Mark Antony and Cleopatra, and taken a new name: Augustus. The hall where Caesar died was walled up and treated as a place of ill omen. Then Augustus turned this flat meadow by the river, the Campus Martius, into a showcase of his peace, his family and his own eternity. By the way, the name Argentina has nothing to do with South America. It comes from Argentoratum, the Latin name of Strasbourg, home city of Johannes Burckard, a papal master of ceremonies around 1500, whose tower house still stands on a corner nearby. The cats have been cared for by volunteers among the ruins for decades, and since 2023 new walkways let visitors go down among the temples themselves. Now head west along the main road, past the great dome of Sant'Andrea della Valle, and slip into the lanes on your left... where a street bends for no visible reason.