Ancient Rome: The Daily Life of Ordinary Romans

You know the emperors, the legions and the famous battles. But you have no idea what a Roman street actually smelled like at breakfast, who was shouting, what was cooking, or where the water in the baths had been.

This is Rome from the ground up. You climb the stairs of a crowded apartment block, queue at a bakery counter worn smooth by hands, watch the laundry trade run on collected urine, listen in at the baths where deals and insults travelled faster than water, and read the graffiti scratched by people who never expected to be remembered. Every chapter is built on the evidence itself, from the buried rooms of Pompeii and the warehouses of Ostia to the letters Romans wrote to each other about rent, dinner parties and difficult slaves.

By the end you can picture the whole working day of an ordinary Roman, and a ruin stops being rubble and starts being somebody's kitchen. Press play, and step into the noise.