 Hey, this is Darius Aurea for our inaugural Rome This Week. And this week, we're visiting Largo Argentina, the site we've talked about many times, but I want to take a specific look today at the conservation work that's going on here. Finally, this site is being rehabilitated and it will be accessible. We will see some new imagery of what the site is going to look like when it's open to the public, hopefully open to the public as early as this spring in 2022. But what we can see just panning along here on the far side is Temple D that goes underneath the street, over here to Temple C, over to the round Temple B, behind which was the curate over Julius Caesar was assassinated and finally Temple A. So let's go and take a little walk around this site and point out some of the work that's going on. You can already see that the crane has been here in place and in action for several months now. Well, let's go around the site here. Actually, right down below, right here, this is one of our two latrines. So when Julius Caesar was assassinated, the cordia where he was killed is shut down and latrines are placed on either side of this site. So this green patch of grass right here actually represents one of the two latrines that were on either side of the cordia that is ultimately walled off. Let's go take a look. So it's a beautiful day in Rome. In January, the sun is out. We can step right up here. We can step right up here and underneath this pine tree right here, panning down, here are some of the remains of the walls that belong to the cordia where Julius Caesar himself was assassinated. You can't see too much work has been done here but if we look at Temple B, if we look at Temple B, we can see indeed it's been recently cleaned. We can see the two columns. We can see the brickwork where the open spaces between the columns have been filled in in the imperial period and then ultimately still stuck it over. So it would have had that appearance of marble in the ancient times. The last restoration here is taking place after the fire of ADAD, the fire under the Emperor Titus, which devastates much of the campus marshes. So it's amazing to think that we're standing right now on top of the remains of the cordia where Julius Caesar is assassinated on the Ides of March. We have a great video on that. Keep in mind that you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, Ancient Rome Live. I can take a look right up here. Again, this is an area that still needs to be cleaned but panning down right over here, we can see some shops that are added in the imperial period. Some people wanna see some of these shop spaces as the statue aquarium where you actually have the office of the creators in charge of the aqueducts right next to Temple A and Temple A here that has become a church in the Middle Ages is usually identified as the Temple of Euttoni, who's a water goddess, thereby making it pretty logical to place the statue aquarium next to that temple of that goddess of water. And directly down below us, we can see just right here the trough of the other mega public latrine, one of the greatest public latrines in the Roman world. Again, created here after the assassination of Julius Caesar. Beautiful sunny day here in January. We're dropping one video a week on our YouTube channel. You can also follow my YouTube channel, Darius Aria, is a lot of related content. We have our master class that you can sign up for at hromelive.org, there's a master class at the end of each month, the last Sunday of the month. And we are offering two free seminars, twice a month, it's all on our calendar. This week, we just talked about who is Giacomo Boni, the excavator of the Roman Forum. There's lots to learn at Ancient Rome Live. And we still have an ongoing online course that you can sign up for. And that is the engineering and architecture of Ancient Rome. So if we pivot back into the temple of temple A, maybe the temple of Yatorna, we can even zoom in and see some of the frescoes underneath that little app space. So this is becoming the lime kiln, the lime burners of the Middle Ages, send the coal as a patron saint. So some of these spaces get reused in the Christian era. But most do not, and we can pivot over here to the newly reclaimed pavement. This is restored in 80 AD after the fire, but that travertine stone there has been repaved in recent months as part of the restoration work funded by Bulgari. So what's gonna happen here, if we take a look at the grass down below, we can actually see a whole series of new holes up in dug that are very rectilinear and in a row, you're gonna have a walkway that's gonna be placed right on top of those holes for piles. And you're gonna have then an accessible walkway that doesn't impinge upon or damage the ancient surfaces. So that's what's in part being constructed today, a new route for future visitors. And over here where the staircase is, they're gonna be inserting an elevator. Let's go take a look at some renderings. What's in store for us? So you're gonna have a museum space. You're gonna have information. You're gonna have much more of the great access and some of the finds that we associate with this site are gonna be returning to their original location. So it's gonna be pretty awesome. This is giving an idea then of the walkways, paneling and wood, guardrails and so forth. It's kind of what you're seeing already in the form of Julius Caesar. This area right here, which is up until this day abandoned, you see it's gonna also be a museum site. So there is some good that's gonna come to this site and you can see right here, it's gonna be accessible to everybody. This is the elevator shaft. So it really is a wonderful opportunity that we're gonna get with Largo Argentina and if we come right over here, we can see the confines of the archeological site, temples A, B, C and D, Yotarno, Fortune of this day, probably Faronia, maybe here the Laredes or the Nymphs. We can see prior to the excavations, the medieval neighborhood that is destroyed in the excavations done in the 20s in the Fascist era. Here are the great discoveries. This head of Fortuna found in temple B originally identified as Apollo, but actually it's Fortuna, she's in Montmartini. So we have a lot of really interesting history that's being detailed to us. Great discoveries, big archeological excavation. It's been in a lamentable shape and now in recent years, in recent months, so much is happening. We're really excited about the opportunities that's gonna give to everybody because you're gonna be coming inside finally once again. A great window into Republican Roman times, but it's also behind temple B, the remains of the Coria, where Julius Caesar was assassinated in the Ides of March. It's a great project, it's in progress and we're happy to share this progress with you as things advance and hopefully we'll take you into the site as early as this spring. So that's Rome This Week from Largo, Argentina. Thanks for joining and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, Ancient Rome Live.