This observation comes from Laura Antonucci, who has guided in Rome for over a decade.

“In the Forum people ask me to show them the exact spot where Caesar was killed. They ask with real feeling — it is often the thing they most want to see. And the spot is not here.”

The expectation is well founded. The senate did meet in the Forum, its chamber is still standing there, and this is where Caesar ruled. Every element of the reasoning is correct.

Only the date is wrong.

Why the senate was somewhere else that morning

In 52 BC, during the riots that followed the murder of Clodius, the crowd carried his body into the senate house in the Forum and burned it there. The building went up with him.

Caesar undertook to replace it. The new chamber — the Curia Iulia , the brick hall still standing at the north end of the Forum — was his project, and in March of 44 BC it was not finished.

So the senate met wherever it could. On the fifteenth of that month, it convened in a large hall attached to the theatre Pompey had built across the city, in the Campus Martius: the Curia of Pompey.

That is where it happened. Caesar was killed in a borrowed room, beneath a statue of the rival he had defeated, because the chamber he was building for the senate was still a construction site.

It was part of something much larger

The room where Caesar died did not stand alone.

It formed part of the enormous architectural complex created by Pompey in the Campus Martius. The Theatre of Pompey, inaugurated in 55 BC, was the first permanent stone theatre built in Rome.

Behind the theatre stretched a monumental portico and gardens. At the eastern end of this complex stood the meeting hall used by the senate: the Curia of Pompey.

Modern Rome has almost completely absorbed the ancient complex. Streets, churches, palaces and squares now occupy what was once one of the largest public architectural projects of Republican Rome.

Where to go

Largo di Torre Argentina, a ten-minute walk from the Forum, past the Capitol and towards the Pantheon.

For decades it could only be looked at from the pavement above. In 2023, new walkways and a lift opened and visitors were finally able to descend into the archaeological area.

What survives is extraordinary: four Republican temples, among the oldest standing sacred structures in the city, together with remains connected to the monumental complex of Pompey.

What to look at

Look towards the western side of the archaeological area, behind the Republican temples.

The remains in this sector are associated with the eastern side of Pompey’s monumental complex and with the area traditionally identified with the Curia of Pompey.

What survives today is fragmentary. The room itself is no longer an intact chamber waiting to be entered.

That is precisely what makes the place interesting. The assassination that became one of the most famous scenes in Western history took place in a structure now reduced to archaeological traces beneath the modern city.

And there are cats. A colony has lived among the temples for decades, and they remain part of the modern identity of Largo Argentina.

Rome still remembers the Ides of March

Every year around 15 March, historical reenactments in Rome recall the assassination of Julius Caesar.

Costumed participants reconstruct episodes connected with the final hours of Caesar and the political crisis that followed his death.

The reenactment is not archaeological evidence, of course. But it demonstrates something else: more than two thousand years later, the event still occupies an extraordinary place in the historical imagination of Rome.

Caesar was killed in a borrowed room because his own was not ready. The chamber he was building is still standing, roofed, in the Forum. The place where he died survives only in fragments within a vast archaeological landscape ten minutes away.

The famous scene belongs to history. The room itself belongs to the archaeology beneath modern Rome.