This private covers in-depth the interior of the Coliseum, the valley of the Roman Forum and the Palatine hill, which for centuries were the beating heart of ancient Rome and today are grand archeological parks.

The Roman Forum
In the Forum, a series of temples and public buildings including the Senate (la Curia), accommodated the majority of political, religious, and administrative activity, while the great square that occupies the central area was destined for assemblies of the people, who were addressed on various occasions by the Magistrates, speaking from the podium constructed for that purpose. More specifically, in this great and suggestive puzzle of imposing ruins of successive eras, one of the fundamental aspects of our guided visit will be to show how the original buildings, in their form, function, and meaning were integral to the Roman system of laws, institutions, and religious practices. Precisely in these spaces that gave place to crucial passages of history, we will also retrace the lives of the great men of the time, from Cicero to Julius Cesar, from Marc Anthony to the many emperors, including Augustus, Hadrian, and Constantine. These magical places preserve a tangible memory of events in the form and imprint of the actual spaces, so for example, here on the Via Sacra the stone blocks carry the imprint of the ruts from the metal carriage wheels that passed down this street, and on the steps of the Basilica Julia there are the engraved traces of ancient game boards. By way of such important sites as the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, the Arch of Titus, the Arch of Septimius Severus, the Basilica of Maxentius, the Senate, the House and the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, the Temple of Saturn, the Temple of the Divine Julius, and others, we will immerse ourselves in the history and the public life of ancient Rome and the surprising development of its empire that extended, by the end of the first century AD, from Africa to the North of England, and from Spain to Turkey, bringing together in Rome merchandise, techniques, ideas, and wonders never-yet-seen.

The Palatine hill
In the broad and beautiful spaces of the Palatine hill, with a breathtaking view of the entire city and not far from the original site of huts inhabited by the founders of the city more than 2,700 years ago - as deduced by archeologists from the form of funerary urns in the shape of little huts - we will walk in the footsteps of the emperors who made this hill their home. We will visit the house of the emperor Augustus, small in dimensions but with extraordinary frescoes (for reasons of the microclimate and the fragility of the frescoes only five people are admitted at a time, and the site is subject to frequent unannounced closures), and the grand palaces the successive emperors constructed and inhabited in an extreme display of luxury and power, often comporting themselves as actual divinities. The imposing architecture of multiple levels, from the enormous convivial halls like the Triclinium, to those dedicated to recreation like the Stadium, together with the majestic structures of the Severian Baths and the Claudian aqueduct will permit us to investigate the private dimension and daily life of the Roman rulers and people. The habits, the food and wine found on the tables of the emperor and the great aristocratic families, the technological know-how that gave rise to nine active acqueducts in Rome by the end of the first century AD, the heating systems for heating some of the rooms, and the diffusion of the baths will be other subjects for discussion. We will also encounter the fascinating world of Greek and Oriental myths whose recurring presence in Roman culture is documented in the decoration of the temples and in the statues we will see in the Palatine museum, and in the temples of Apollo and the goddess Cibele—the cult of the latter originated in Asia Minor but was extremely widespread in Rome. These objects that remain also show us the complexity of the culture, a culture much more faceted with more subtle and diversified symbolism than is suggested by the oversimplifications that circulate. To give just one example, there was a widespread diffusion of imagery and inscriptions with which the emperors constructed the myth of their presumed divinity, which included among other things, a hairstyle worn by women of very high society. They wore an elaborate arrangement with the hair forming a refined crown, what today we would call sixties style (you can see fine sculptural examples of this in our guided visit of the Capitoline Museums). Even certain slaves followed the fashion of the times, as is evidenced by a funerary monument of the first century AD in which two slaves show off a hairdo of curls in the manner of the adored Nero, a hairdo obtained by the laborious application of a hot iron to the hair. Finally, from the grand terraces facing the Circus Maximus, from which the emperors presided over the games in a position of absolute dominance, it will be easy to comprehend the strategic nature of the location and the urban development of Rome, from its origins to the centuries of maximum splendor (1st-2nd c. AD) and from there to the phases of extreme decadence anticipating the political and territorial decline of the empire—subjects absolutely fundamental to the understanding of Christian Rome risen in the Middle Ages from these ashes.

The Coliseum
After the Arch of Constantine with its relief sculpture taken from preceding epochs and readapted, the Coliseum will occupy our attention. We will elaborate on the construction techniques, the original structure and its decoration, the organization of the gladiator games and the manner in which they took place following the various phases of collective delirium in a full day at the arena. We will likewise dedicate our attention to understanding who were these gladiators and how they were trained. We will consider the social and propagandistic roles that these widespread and nearly unanimously accepted spectacles of death played in the complex multicultural society of the time. Here, too, we will deal with unusual aspects of our subject, such as for example, the love stories, well documented by the writers of the time, that blossomed within the arena, and the religious origins of the games that date back to the Etruscan culture with its earliest celebrations held in the great square of the Forum. The successive phases of the Coliseum, while hard to imagine, nonetheless show visible traces of the years of abandonment, and pillaging of materials for reuse down to the modern era, and with this we complete our exclusive voyage into the world of the gladiator games.