Her beauty was a blade... Valeria Messalina, the third wife of emperor Tiberius Claudius, was of the purple blood of the Julii. And that blood was boiling. History would remember her as a royal libertine, a fantasy of forbidden excesses: the empress who proudly beat the renowned prostitutes of her time at their own game. In truth, no one knows who Messalina really was. An imperial whore or a victim of circumstance and calumny? Perhaps she was just a young woman who found herself in a deadly court and simply fought to win the kiss of glory... Step into a world of scandal and forbidden pleasures in imperial Rome, illustrated with more than 30 original artistic nude and erotic photographs.