Ancient Rome Live has just uploaded a great video tour of the refurbished Largo Argentina site led by Darius Arya. The ten-minute video gives an overview of the site’s stages, highlighting each of the four republican temples, a small number of remains from Pompey’s Curia where Caesar was stabbed (although not actually at this site), and the remains of medieval residential and ecclesiastical buildings.
Of course, first the cats get their due – the priorities – and then Darius walks through the area in several different directions, highlighting the layers of Rome from different eras represented in this one archaeological park. They carved a couple of breathtaking photographs taken during the first excavations in the 1920s, including an exceptional find of the marble head of a colossal acrolytic statue. (The acroliths had wooden bodies with heads and limbs not covered in clothing made of marble or stone.) The tour ends with a newly opened space under the current street, previously inaccessible to the public storerooms, now turned into a jewelry box. a museum that exhibits artifacts discovered there and explains the multi-layered history of the site.
Here’s something I didn’t know thanks to Darius’s account: the part of the Pompeian Curia that intersected what would become the square in the center of Greater Argentina was destroyed during the imperial era and replaced by a public latrine. Also very good! Long and roomy to accommodate several Roman calls of nature at once.
