Suburra

Wall from a house in the Suburra

Suburra (usually spelled Subura in antiquity) is an area of the city of Rome, Italy. In ancient Roman times, it was a crowded lower-class area that was also notorious as a red-light district. It lies in the dip between the southern end of the Viminal and the western end of the Esquiline hills. Most of its inhabitants lived in insulae, tall apartment buildings with tabernae on the ground floor.

Julius Caesar grew up in a family home (domus) in the Subura district, as the Subura had grown up around the property many years before his birth.

References in popular culture

Colleen McCullough, in her fictional series Masters of Rome, depicts Caesar's mother (like her son) as sympathetic with the lower classes and that she purchased a tenement building in the Subura as a residence.

The Subura plays a role in Steven Saylor's historical novel, Roman Blood and in Martha Marks' historical novel Rubies of the Viper.

In the SPQR series of historical detective stories, the narrator Decius Caecillius Metellus Iunior lived in Subura.

External links

• Subura (article in Platner's Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome)
• Location of Caesars house in Subura (Historian Peter Oersteds speculation: The location of Caesars house in the Subura)