Sixty senators cornered Rome's dictator here
Fortuna Huiusce Diei, Aedes, part of the sacred area at Largo di Torre Argentina in Rome, marks the site where Julius Caesar was stabbed roughly 23 times by around sixty senators on the Ides of March, 44 BC, during a Senate meeting held at the nearby Curia of Pompey.
Sixty senators stabbed Caesar about 23 times here
Julius Caesar died a few feet from where you stand. On March 15, 44 BC, he walked into a Senate meeting at the Curia of Pompey, a meeting hall built into the Theatre of Balbus. He had just been named dictator for life. A group of senators surrounded him and stabbed him about 23 times.
The plot had two leaders everyone remembers and a third often forgotten. Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus organized the conspiracy. A third man, Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus, was just as important. He had served under Caesar for years and used that trust to help lure him into the room. Around 60 senators were in on the plan.
They said they were saving the Republic. Caesar had ignored the Senate's authority, taken lifelong power, and let a crowd greet him as king during a festival weeks earlier. Killing him, they believed, would restore the old order.
It did the opposite. Caesar's death triggered years of civil war between his avenging heirs and his killers. Rome ended up with an emperor, Augustus, instead of a restored Senate. The spot where Caesar fell now sits below street level, fenced off in the ruins of Largo di Torre Argentina, visible but unreachable, exactly like the Republic the conspirators tried to save.
A colossal Fortune lay buried near Caesar's death spot
Long before Caesar bled here, a Roman general built a temple a few steps from this spot to thank a goddess for a battle won on a single fortunate day. Temple B, part of the same sacred complex now known as Largo di Torre Argentina, held a colossal statue of Fortuna Huiusce Diei, "the Fortune of This Day." Only her head, arms, and legs were marble. The rest of her body was built on a wooden frame, hidden under a painted robe.
At some point the statue was smashed, and the pieces vanished into the ground. They stayed there for close to two thousand years.
In 1927, workers demolishing this neighborhood for a new government building hit stone below the surface. They had found the sacred area intact: four Republican-era temples, buried and forgotten. Fortuna's marble head and arms came up out of the dirt that year. She had watched over Caesar's murder and disappeared for as long as Rome had existed since, before the Fascist-era clearance dragged her back into daylight.
A war temple ended its life as a church
The oldest of the four temples in this square, Temple A, went up in the 200s BC. It was probably built to fulfill a vow made by the Roman commander Gaius Lutatius Catulus after his fleet crushed the Carthaginians in 241 BC, ending the First Punic War.
A fire tore through the area in AD 80 and damaged the temple along with much of the district. It was rebuilt. But its purpose didn't survive as long as its walls. By the early 900s, the pagan temple had been converted into a Christian church, San Nicola de Calcarario. Its apses and old frescoes are still part of the ruins today.
A temple raised to celebrate a Roman military triumph ended its life with a different god entirely, its founders and their war forgotten by the people who repurposed its walls.
A papal bureaucrat's nickname renamed the whole square
Thirteen hundred years after that conversion, a stranger from outside Italy put his name on this ground. In 1503, Johannes Burckardt, the Papal Master of Ceremonies, built a palace on what is now via del Sudario. Burckardt came from Strasbourg, whose old Latin name was Argentoratum, "Silver City." Because of that name, Romans called him "Argentinus."
His palace, the Casa del Burcardo, still stands, and a tower attached to it became known as the Torre Argentina, the Silver Tower. The whole square you're standing in front of, Largo di Torre Argentina, took its name from a papal bureaucrat's hometown, not from Rome's own dead statesmen who fell nearby.
The palace and tower survived the demolitions of the 1920s that tore down the medieval quarter around them, including the church of San Nicola dei Cesarini. Burckardt's borrowed name outlasted the neighborhood itself.
The dictator's blood, the goddess's statue, and the foreign clerk's tower all ended up buried in the same small square, and only one of them was ever dug back up on purpose.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and it will dig the ground you are standing on instead, wherever that is.