Largo Argentina ★

The sunken ruins of Largo Argentina in Rome, Italy, where Julius Caesar met his assassins and now cats nestle like easter eggs amongst the tall grasses

Today, Largo del Torre Argentina is largely known as the piazza where you frequently have to change buses, but set into its middle is an excavated zone sporting a trio of ancient temples, their columns poking up like broken teeth, their grassy foundations prowling with Rome's largest colony of stray cats, which legend holds are hosts for the ghosts of ancient Romans.

The site has been opened to visitors only sporadically and rarely over the years; call ahead to check just in case you get lucky, but consider it permanently closed.

(You can, however, nip into the cat sanctuary shelter halfway down one staircase to chat with the harried cat lovers who try to keep up with spaying and inoculating the feral felines—at least until they are evicted, which the city is always threatening to do.)

Still, you can see it all from the road, really.

I find the Largo Argentina ruins all the more remarkable for the fact that they just sort of sit there, un-remarked upon—which is especially puzzling given that every 9th grader has read Julius Caesar, and here is the exact spot where he was killed!

Why so few guides or guidebooks bothers pointing this out mystifies me to this day. Therefore:

Et tu, Bruté?

Against the eastern edge of the excavations you can see the jumbled remains of some brick walls. This was the exit to Pompey's Theater and Baths complex, which the Roman Senate was using in the 1st century BC to hold their meetings while the main Senate house in the Forum was being rebuilt.

It was while exiting one of these meetings, on these very steps now covered in cats, that Brutus, Cassius, and the other conspirators fell upon Julius Caesar and stabbed him to death.

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