Much of the Forum of Julius Caesar at Rome was hurriedly uncovered in the early 1930s as the Alessandrino quarter of the city was demolished and preparations were made for the building of Mussolini's new processional route between Piazza Venezia and the Colosseum. Further excavations took place here in the 1970s and 1980s, and then in the late 1990s, as part of a major research project on the imperial fora. Delfino's book reports in exemplary fashion on the most recent investigations (2005–2008) in Caesar's Forum, focusing on the earliest phases of the monument, and on the archaic and republican levels that lay below its paving.

We know from Cicero's correspondence that in the summer of 54 BC Julius Caesar, based in Gaul and about to invade Britain for a second time, was buying up property through agents in the vicinity of the Forum Romanum at vast expense, in order to build a monumentum (monument) (Cic. Att. 4.16.8). Caesar's project involved making a substantial cutting into the side of the Capitoline hill; ahead of construction much of the designated area was cleared down to the natural clay, but the slope of the hill meant that what was to become the south-east part of the new Forum was at a lower level than the rest of the site. As a result, earlier archaeological levels were preserved in this area, revealing a settlement sequence dating from later prehistory through to the late Republic.

Terracing and a roadway dating to the later Bronze Age, followed by burials from the eleventh/tenth centuries BC, represent the earliest phases of activity. Subsequent to the abandonment of this cemetery in the mid-tenth century, a hut was constructed, itself later replaced by a kiln. Early in the sixth century, two houses were constructed on the site. Following a fire, these houses were replaced by further residential buildings in the first half of the fourth century, surviving in modified form until Caesar's clearance of the site three centuries later.

Delfino's presentation of the evidence is very clear, and he takes particular care to distinguish reporting of the archaeological evidence from his reconstructions and historical analysis. This is particularly helpful in the discussion of the residential phases of the site: the sixth-century houses are reconstructed as sequences of rooms facing onto a courtyard, comparable to the sixth- and fifth-century phases at the Auditorium site to the north of the city (Carandini et al. Reference Carandini, D’Alessio and Di Giuseppe2006), while one of the fourth-century buildings is reconstructed in the classic atrium-house style. Given the comparatively small quantity of evidence available as a result of the first-century BC levelling process, the reconstruction of these structures as high-status domestic residences is inevitably hypothetical (Delfino himself refers to the reconstructions as “the fruit of speculation”, p. 135), but the location, in proximity to the key political spaces of the regal and republican city, would clearly be an appropriate one for such elite housing.

Delfino sees the destruction of the sixth-century houses by fire as a consequence of the attack on Rome by Gaulish invaders in 390 BC, and one chapter of the book discusses the evidence for this episode, often thought to have left no trace in the archaeological record. Radiocarbon dating of carbonised wood from the destruction level points towards the latter part of the period 520–400 BC, while the pottery evidence dates the preparations for rebuilding on the site to the first half of the fourth century BC; both indicators seem compatible with an early fourth-century date for the fire. Relating archaeological destruction levels to specific historically attested events is of course potentially problematic (see Snodgrass Reference Snodgrass1987: 65–66 for a cautionary modern example), and the details of Livy's narrative of these events (on which Delfino bases his analysis) may owe much to rhetoric and invention, as well as his sources’ use of Herodotus' account of the sack of Athens by the invading Persians in 480 BC (see Richardson Reference Richardson2012: 130–38). Investigations elsewhere in Rome, however, are reported to have discovered similar destruction levels—yet to be fully published—while construction activity dated to the first half of the fourth century BC, at the Temple of Vesta for example, may be indicative of rebuilding in other locations in the city after the Gallic sack. If Delfino is correct to identify the houses under the Forum of Caesar as elite residences, their destruction in the events of 390 BC seems plausible enough.

Perhaps the main contribution of the book, however, is the archaeological confirmation it provides that Caesar's Forum was laid out in more than one phase, and Delfino neatly relates the archaeological sequence to the complex series of events outlined by the literary texts. The first phase represents the portico originally planned by Caesar in 54 BC: his ‘monument’ was apparently designed to outdo the theatre and portico built on the Campus Martius the previous year by his rival Cn. Pompeius (and, it might be added, the basilica being constructed by the Aemilius family adjacent to the Forum Romanum at that time). Only later, after Caesar's victory at the battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC, was the portico conceived of as a new Forum, and its temple dedicated to Venus Genetrix. The second phase was that associated with Caesar's heir; examination of the foundations shows that Octavian extended the Forum another 20m to the south-east to align its façade with the side of his new Senate House, the Curia Iulia, which was inaugurated in 29 BC.

Delfino and his collaborators (there are substantial contributions by Helga Di Giuseppe, Sabrina Zampini and others) have thus identified and reconstructed a hitherto unknown residential area on the lower slopes of the Capitoline, highlighted Caesar's major impact on the landscape of this part of the city, and confirmed the role of Octavian in the extension and completion of the complex. They have made a significant contribution to our knowledge of the very centre of the city of Rome.