The vast residential compound spread out on the Esquiline Hill, one of the seven hills on which the city was originally built, in the area around the current Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II. As reported by Suetonius, the Michael Wolff of ancient Rome, he never forgot a slight, slept only a few hours a night and married several times, lastly to a woman named Milonia.ĭuring the four years that Caligula occupied the Roman throne, his favorite hideaway was an imperial pleasure garden called Horti Lamiani, the Mar-a-Lago of its day. The fourth of the 12 Caesars, Caligula - officially, Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus - was a capricious, combustible first-century populist remembered, perhaps unfairly, as the empire’s most tyrannical ruler.
