Seven of Italy's leading history professors whose lessons have become a national podcast phenomenon will return to Rome this weekend to prove their subject is alive and kicking once again.
The professors from the Universities of Rome, Florence, Bari and Piedmont first shot to stardom last winter during an enormously popular series of free public lessons, each focussing on one crucial day in the history of Rome.
Thousands of people queued for hours in the hope of snapping up a ticket at Rome's Auditorium-Parco della Musica, a venue which has also played host to international headliners Pink and the Scissor Sisters this year.
Crowds unable to squeeze into the packed 1,200-capacity room chosen for the series watched events unfold on a giant screen in the lobby, and many more were turned away at the doors.
The professors were so successful in spicing up the past for their audiences that lines of autograph-hunters waited to collar them after the lessons, which ran chronologically from Rome's legendary foundation in 753 BC to the massacre of 335 Italians by Nazi soldiers at the Fosse Ardeatine in 1944.
Confirming the historians' new star status, the audio files of the series were posted as free podcasts on Apple's digital media shopping website iTunes.
Since the lessons finished in March over 355,000 people have downloaded the files, which can be transferred to portable MP3 players as easily as the latest chart hits.
Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni described the series as "a roaring success".
"More than 30,000 people turned up to queue in front of the Auditorium in the early morning in the cold, but the most surprising thing is the number of people who downloaded those lessons from the internet - and the total continues to grow," Veltroni said.
"It's a fantastic result that confirms the Italians' extraordinary demand for culture and history," he added.
This weekend the professors will be joined by two new colleagues as they return to the capital in triple bills under the stars at three famous landmarks: the Capitoline Hill, the Colosseum and Castel Sant Angelo.
"Now the lessons move into the open to the places where history was made," Veltroni explained.
Among the weekend's highlights will be Luciano Canfora of the University of Bari at the Capitoline Hill discussing the homicidal tendencies of Roman senators quick to assassinate political figures who weren't towing the party line.
At the same venue restorer Antonio Forcellino will hold forth on the love-hate relationship with Rome that tortured Michelangelo, the great Florentine artist who never stopped being violently homesick and had wine, cheese and shirts sent to him in the capital from Tuscany.
Archaeologist Andrea Carandini of Rome's La Sapienza University will reveal the secrets of unearthing where the great leaders of Rome lived at the Colosseum, and Andrea Giardina of the Italian Institute of Human Sciences will examine our morbid fascination with the gory battles of the gladiators and the exotic animals that were shipped to the capital to meet a public death.
At Castel Sant'Angelo, Antonio Pinelli of Florence University will describe the slow process of building St Peter's, which took almost a century and a half to complete.
"We re expecting a big turn-out and there will be giant screens in the street showing the lessons for those who don t manage to get a seat," said Nicola Attadio, spokesman for organiser and publishing house Laterza.
"Since they're being held outdoors, the acoustic quality may not be quite good enough to post the lessons on the web, but a new indoor series is set to begin at the Auditorium in November which will certainly be available for download," he added.
