Charismatic figure with a strong personality, also known as the first prince-woman, Julia Agrippina Augusta of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, she was one of the most powerful women in theRoman Empire.

Daughter of Agrippina Major and Germanicus Julius Caesar, was born in Ara Ubiorum (now the German city of Cologne) in his father's military camp.

From a young age Agrippina hated her great-uncle. Tiberius, who certainly by his acts did not prove worthy of his great-granddaughter's affection. In fact, Tiberius, probably out of envy toward the military achievements of Germanicus Julius Caesar exterminated her family. Only she, her sisters Julia Livilla and Julia Drusilla and Gaius Caesar, better known as Caligula, third Roman emperor, who succeeded Tiberius.

The same great-uncle later forced Agrippina to marry the Roman politician Gnaeus Domitius Enobarbus. From this marriage was born Lucius Nero.

A few years after her husband's death in 49 CE, she was chosen as a wife by theEmperor Claudius, exerting increasing influence on the family's political decisions, going so far as to have his son designated as heir Nero. During this period she was given the role of flaminica, highest priestess of the Roman state.

The woman's enterprising nature, however, soon clashed with her son's increasing need for independence, as Nero, by now emperor, felt too burdened by his mother's constant presence, even in his private life.

So he decided to kill his mother, or at least that is what the most reliable sources say. Some scholars, through the inconsistencies noted in the writings of Tacitus, a Roman historian, orator, and senator, claim that Agrippina had managed to escape without her son's knowledge, still others that she had committed suicide.

Agrippina also received the title of Augusta which, although it did not directly respond to the meaning of empress, was certainly an office of honorable prestige the result of her tenacity and strength. She was the founder of the Roman city of Cologne on the Rhine.

Legend and history meet

It seems that his son Lucius Nero one day decided to sink the ship carrying his mother Agrippina from Bay, along the Phlegrean coast at Anzio. As chance would have it, another woman was also on the ship, who plunged into the sea and claimed to be Agrippina in order to be rescued. The sailors then, Nero's accomplices, killed her by striking her with their oars.

Agrippina witnessed the scene and swam to her own villa in Lucrino. There she was later found by Nero's assassins and killed. It is said that the empress spontaneously asked to be shot in the belly, where she had given birth to her son.

There are many doubts about the woman's burial place. Tacitus speaks of a hill between Baia and Bacoli, but in the absence of a find a quite different complex located along the beach of the Bacoli marina, an ancient odeion (theater) of a Roman villa, called the Tomb of Agrippina. 

It is right here that the rumors of this ghostly figure wandering around her grave combing her long hair mirrored in the clear waters of the sea are consumed.

Considering Agrippina's stubbornness, it is not hard for us to believe this folk tale, which gives the place a mysterious atmosphere.