A native of France, resident in Germany (Frankfurt am Main), and employed in the UK music industry, in 2012 Raddato started her Following Hadrian blog to tell the stories behind her photographs.

Self-trained as a photographer and ancient history writer, she has built up an enormous worldwide following, especially on Twitter (62,000+ followers @CaroleMadge).

The quality of Carole Raddato’s images of both sites and artifacts is more often than not the best available anywhere. Strikingly, she has made all her images free for use under the Creative Commons / Attribution-ShareAlike license. Her photographs have found their way now into hundreds of academic books.

Carole has also published a steady stream of illustrated essays for Ancient History Magazine and articles for the online Ancient History Encyclopedia, as well as Antigone Journal. In November 2019 Carole Raddato also made a major and wholly original discovery in Roman portraiture concerning Rome’s Ludovisi collection.

So far, Carole Raddato has photographed well over 1000 sites and museums focusing on the classical past. These include significant but less-visited archaeological areas outside of continental Europe, including Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkey (many hard-to-access sites in southern and eastern Anatolia), Israel, Jordan, Armenia, Egypt, Iran and Lebanon. One of Raddato’s most valuable contributions is photographing ephemeral exhibitions of antiquity; her lasting contribution to the contemporary study of classical antiquity is already secured.

“I usually try to use Hadrian’s journeys as a leading thread for my own adventures”, says Raddato. But starting in 2017—the 1900th anniversary of Hadrian’s accession as emperor—she decided to take it one step further. Carole Raddato has committed to a commemoration of Hadrian that will last for the length of his principate—21 years, from 2017 to 2038.

Her aim? “To try to follow Hadrian’s journeys according to the year they were undertaken.” She has already completed the journeys of the first six years of Hadrian’s reign (117-122 CE), excavating at Vindolanda in summer 2022 (next summer too).

When receiving the gift of Carole Raddato’s collection of photographs, the American Academy in Rome in its announcement counted it as “the most important collection of images of antiquity to come to the Academy since Ernest Nash’s Fototeca Unione was formed in 1956, and is the first to consist of photos taken wholly in the twenty-first century”.

For some samples of work, Raddato’s introductory page at the American Academy of Rome site is a good place to start. She also maintains a blog documenting her travels.