Emperors After Dark: Caesar, Agrippa, Hadrian and Julia

A storytelling walk about six Romans, told at the places where their lives happened, which is possible in this city and almost nowhere else. It starts at Largo Argentina, on the spot where Julius Caesar was killed. Then the Pantheon, and Marcus Agrippa, who in the 1st century BC made himself the second most powerful man alive by being reliably loyal to the first, which is a rarer talent than ambition. Piazza di Pietra and the columns of Hadrian's temple, for an emperor who preferred building and travelling to conquering. Piazza Colonna, where the column raised for Marcus Aurelius carries a spiral relief of the wars he spent his reign fighting on the Danube. The Mausoleum of Augustus is where the walk turns. The guide tells the story of his only child, Julia: intelligent, funny, entirely unwilling to be the ornament her father's regime required, and exiled by him to a small island where she died. It is the hardest story of the evening and the one people remember. It ends at Piazza del Popolo, where Nero was buried, with his mother Agrippina, his obsession with being taken seriously as a performer, and how a man that powerful ended up dying badly. Meet at the Torre del Papito, the only brick tower in Largo di Torre Argentina.