A mad idea from Nero

The excavations carried out in 2009 on the Palatine Hill in Rome, by a French and Italian team of archaeologists, discovered the ruins of a building from the time of the Emperor Nero with some very special features. It is a circular construction that seems to have served as a support for some complicated machinery. It is believed to have been used to rotate the table in the main dining room of the emperor’s palace. In this documentary, based on the account from the historian Suetonius, the iconography present on coins and the archaeological dig, we are offered a hypothetical reconstruction of the mechanism.

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