In this talk, prof. Laetitia La Follette traces some of her adventures as an archaeologist working on ancient monuments in Rome. These involved going deep underground on the Aventine Hill and finding first, an ancient house with mural decoration. That in turn led to a Roman princess, and a long-lost imperial bath complex.

She also shares the way she has reconstructed the outlines of a cold-case: the nineteenth-century theft of a series of exquisite marble portraits of a Roman noble family which were spirited out of Rome first to Paris and eventually wound up in Copenhagen.