Beyond the Trevi Fountain: The ancient Roman’s guide to the secret gems hidden among the tourist sites

If you head to the Colosseum, Vatican and other popular city landmarks, historian Guy de la Bédoyère reveals how to spot the secret ruins of the city hiding in plain sight all captured in his new book

The ruins of a Roman apartment block go unnoticed in the shadow of Rome’s Il Vittoriano and Santa Maria Aracoeli

(Getty Images)

Visitors to Rome routinely take in all the usual sights of the city’s ancient past, from the Forum to the Pantheon and the Colosseum to the Palatine Hill. But for my money, it’s the traces and stories of the lives of the ordinary Romans that provide the real colour.

Just outside the Porta Maggiore is an incongruous sight. A prominent tomb shaped like a stack of bins for kneading dough stands surrounded by modern streets, silent among the racket from the modern traffic that churns around it.

This was the burial place of a successful freedman (libertus) called Eurysaces who lived in 1BC. Eurysaces had a sense of humour. “It is obvious this is the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, baker, contractor”, proclaims the inscription. The tomb is thus an elaborate joke, hence the substitution of dough bins for the usual cremation urns. Apparently, not in the least despondent at the thought of his death, Eurysaces had made a small fortune from his nearby bakery business on a state contract for supplying grain dole and was keen for everyone to know it.