History

Ornate Underground Roman House Featured in Live Video Tours

A livestreamed tour will soon grant public access to a lavish Roman house buried beneath the Palatine Hill for centuries.
Ornate Underground Roman House Featured in Live Video Tours
Detail of the frescoed room with mosaic floor and central emblem with perspective cubes. Colosseum Archaeological Park. Photograph by Simona Murrone
Walker Larson
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Deep beneath the remnants of the Emperor Domitian’s palace on the Palatine Hill in Rome lies a luxurious house, intricately adorned with mosaics and frescoes, long enshrouded in darkness and silence—until now. 
For the first time, this remarkable specimen of late Republic-era architecture is accessible to the public through technological innovation: a livestreamed, on-site video tour. Beginning in March 2026, tourists will remain in the building’s atrium while a guide wearing a video camera will enter the deeper, more inaccessible quarters of the domus (an upper-class townhouse of ancient Rome) to transmit video and audio to a screen for tourists to view.
Walker Larson
Walker Larson
Author
Before becoming a freelance journalist and culture writer, Walker Larson taught literature and history at a private academy in Wisconsin, where he resides with his wife and daughter. He holds a master’s in English literature and language, and his writing has appeared in The Hemingway Review, Intellectual Takeout, and his Substack, The Hazelnut. He is also the author of two novels, “Hologram” and “Song of Spheres.”