The Most Remarkable Ancient Places in Italy
16 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable ancient places in Italy are Colosseum, Roman Forum and Castel Sant'Angelo. The list covers 16 ancient places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Italy holds the ancient world in layers. Greek colonists built temples along the southern coasts, the Etruscans ruled the centre, and Rome then absorbed them all and spread its engineering across an empire. Because Rome never stopped being a city, its monuments were reused rather than lost: tombs became fortresses, temples became churches, and ruins became quarries and landmarks. Volcanic ash, meanwhile, preserved whole towns at a single moment.
Rome carries most of the weight. The Colosseum, completed under Titus, remains the largest amphitheatre ever built; below it, the Roman Forum was the political and religious centre of the city for centuries. The Pantheon, rebuilt under Hadrian, still has the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, open to the sky through its oculus. Trajan's Column records the Dacian campaigns in a frieze that winds up the shaft, Hadrian's tomb became Castel Sant'Angelo, and the Baths of Caracalla show the scale of imperial bathing halls. Santa Maria Maggiore keeps mosaics from the 5th century.
Beyond the capital, Pompeii was buried by Vesuvius in AD 79, leaving streets, houses and frescoes almost intact. At Paestum, south of Salerno, three Greek Doric temples stand among the meadows of the old colony of Poseidonia. In Naples, the Catacombs of San Gennaro hold early Christian paintings, and in the Aosta Valley the Pont d'Aël still carries a Roman aqueduct channel over a deep gorge.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Colosseum | Archaeological site | |
| 2 | Roman Forum | Archaeological site | |
| 3 | Castel Sant'Angelo | Castle | |
| 4 | Trajan's Column | Sculpture | |
| 5 | Column of Marcus Aurelius | Sculpture | |
| 6 | Pompeii | Archaeological site | |
| 7 | Trajan's Market | Ruins | |
| 8 | Baths of Caracalla | Thermae | |
| 9 | Paestum | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 10 | Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore | Church building | ✓ |
| 11 | Pantheon, Rome | Archaeological site | |
| 12 | Sanctuary of Oropa | Pilgrimage site | |
| 13 | Domus Aurea | Ruins | |
| 14 | Catacombs of San Gennaro | Catacombs | |
| 15 | Pont d'Aël | Aqueduct | |
| 16 | Farnese Hercules | Sculpture |
01 Colosseum
Colosseo
Italy · 1.2 km from Rome41.890° N 12.492° E
Image by MARTINOPHUC from Pixabay The eighty-foot drop beneath the Colosseum's sand floor is where the real machinery of the show lived.
Did you know? It held an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 spectators, making it the largest amphitheatre ever built in the ancient world.
02 Roman Forum
Foro Romano
Italy · 0.7 km from Rome41.892° N 12.485° E
Image by jensjunge from Pixabay The Roman Forum fills a small valley between the Palatine and Capitoline hills that was once a marsh. Drained in the 7th century BC by the first stretch of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer that emptied into the Tiber, it became the place where Rome did everything in public: voted, traded, tried criminals, heard speeches, worshipped and celebrated its triumphs.
Did you know? Long before it was a public square, part of the Forum served as an Iron Age cemetery in the 10th century BC, with cremation urns buried in large clay jars.
03 Castel Sant'Angelo
Italy · 1.4 km from Rome41.903° N 12.466° E
Image by rainhard2 from Pixabay Hadrian started building his own tomb in 123 CE and didn't live to see it finished — it was completed in 139 under his successor Antoninus Pius, a cylindrical drum of a monument meant to hold the ashes of an emperor and his family for eternity. Eternity lasted about three centuries as a mausoleum.
Did you know? The current bronze angel by Peter Anton von Verschaffelt replaced a 1536 marble Saint Michael by Raffaello da Montelupo in 1753.
04 Trajan's Column
Colonna Traiana
Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.896° N 12.484° E
Raffaele pagani · CC BY-SA 4.0 Trajan's Column is a 30-metre marble shaft, 35 m with its pedestal, that has stood in Trajan's Forum just north of the Roman Forum since it was dedicated on 12 May 113. It celebrates Emperor Trajan's two wars against the Dacians in 101-102 and 105-106, and it was most likely designed under the architect Apollodorus of Damascus.
Did you know? The lettering of the dedication on the base became the classic model of Roman square capitals, and Carol Twombly based her 1989 Trajan typeface on it.
05 Column of Marcus Aurelius
Colonna di Marco Aurelio
Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.901° N 12.480° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Column of Marcus Aurelius stands in Piazza Colonna, on the Via del Corso in the centre of Rome, in front of Palazzo Chigi, the seat of the Italian government. It was raised to honour the emperor Marcus Aurelius and his campaigns against the Germanic and Sarmatian peoples north of the Danube, fought from 169 until his death in 180, and was completed around 193.
06 Pompeii
Pompei
Italy · 23.2 km from Naples40.751° N 14.490° E
Glen Scarborough from The Central Coast, Australia · CC BY 2.0 Pompeii is the most complete picture we have of an ordinary Roman town, and it owes that to the catastrophe that ended it. In AD 79 Vesuvius, about 8 km away, erupted for two days. First came some eighteen hours of falling pumice, which let many of the inhabitants flee; then surges of superheated gas and ash swept through the streets and killed those who had stayed.
Did you know? After Sulla captured the town in 89 BC it became a colony of his veterans, renamed Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeianorum.
07 Trajan's Market
Mercati di Traiano
Italy · 0.5 km from Rome41.896° N 12.486° E
NikonZ7II · CC BY-SA 4.0 Trajan's Market is a curved cliff of Roman brick set into the side of the Quirinal Hill, above the ruins of Trajan's Forum and across Via dei Fori Imperiali from the Vittoriano. It was probably built between about AD 100 and 110, most likely to designs by Apollodorus of Damascus, Trajan's architect for the forum and for his campaigns, and inaugurated in 113.
08 Baths of Caracalla
Terme di Caracalla
Italy · 2.2 km from Rome41.880° N 12.493° E
Image by pcdazero from Pixabay Few ruins in Rome convey the scale of imperial ambition as bluntly as the Baths of Caracalla. Begun under Septimius Severus and inaugurated by his son Caracalla in AD 216, the complex occupied a walled rectangle of roughly 337 by 328 metres on the southern edge of the city, on land that had once been a garden estate.
Did you know? The baths could hold about 1,600 bathers at once and served an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people a day, free of charge.
09 Paestum
Italy · 34.9 km from Salerno40.423° N 15.006° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SCAPIN from Pixabay Paestum, on the plain south of Salerno, has three Greek temples in the Doric order that are among the best preserved anywhere, standing in open fields inside an almost complete ring of ancient walls. Settlers from Sybaris founded the city around 600 BCE as Poseidonia; the Lucanians took it at the end of the 5th century BCE, and Rome made it a Latin colony called Paestum in 273 BCE.
Did you know? Only about 25 of the city's roughly 120 hectares have been excavated; the rest lies under private land, still unexplored.
10 Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore
Italy · 1.4 km from Rome41.898° N 12.499° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
L'Ospite Inatteso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Santa Maria Maggiore, the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, stands on the summit of the Esquiline Hill and is one of Rome's four major papal basilicas. Unlike most great Roman churches, it has kept the bones of its original Early Christian building.
Did you know? Pope Francis was the first pope buried outside the Vatican since Leo XIII in 1903, and the first in this basilica since Clement IX in 1669.
11 Pantheon, Rome
Pantheon
Italy · 0.4 km from Rome41.899° N 12.477° E
Image by falcon505 from Pixabay The Pantheon is the best-preserved great building of ancient Rome, and its interior is one of the most perfect spaces ever built. The temple first raised by Marcus Agrippa under Augustus burned down; the building that stands today was reconstructed under the emperor Hadrian and completed around AD 126.
Did you know? Two small bell towers added in the 17th century were mocked by Romans as ass's ears and finally taken down in 1883.
12 Sanctuary of Oropa
Santuario di Oropa
Italy45.628° N 7.979° E
Alfiere33 · CC BY-SA 4.0 High in a natural amphitheatre of the Biellese Alps, at roughly 1,160 metres, the Sanctuary of Oropa is less a single church than a small mountain town built for the Virgin. Two basilicas, arcaded courtyards, former royal apartments and long pilgrim wings climb the slope in stages, and the whole ensemble is crowned by a great domed church that can be seen from the plain around Biella.
Did you know? The Black Madonna of Oropa is a wooden statue dated by scholars to around 1300 and attributed to a sculptor from the Aosta Valley.
13 Domus Aurea
Italy · 1.4 km from Rome41.891° N 12.495° E
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain Buried under the Oppian Hill, a stone's throw from the Colosseum, lie the vaulted halls of the most extravagant palace ancient Rome ever saw.
Did you know? An artificial lake in Nero's grounds occupied the valley where the Colosseum was later built.
14 Catacombs of San Gennaro
Catacombe di San Gennaro
Italy · 2.5 km from Naples40.864° N 14.248° E
Dominik Matus · CC BY-SA 4.0 Beneath the slope that climbs from the Sanità district to Capodimonte in northern Naples lies the largest Christian catacomb complex in southern Italy. Unlike the narrow galleries of Rome, the Catacombs of San Gennaro were cut into soft tuff on two levels with broad, high passages, and even whole churches were carved out of the rock.
Did you know? The lower level is the oldest, dating to the 3rd or 4th century, and may have begun as a pre-Christian cemetery.
15 Pont d'Aël
Ponte acquedotto di Pont d'Aël
Italy · 9.9 km from Aosta45.677° N 7.222° E
Enrico Robetto · CC BY-SA 4.0 Pont d'Aël is a Roman bridge-aqueduct thrown across the gorge of the Grand Eyvia torrent at the mouth of the Cogne valley, and it is remarkable for how much of it still stands two thousand years later. 26 metres wide, some 22 metres tall, perched about 66 metres above the bed of a ravine that elsewhere deepens to 150 metres. The tiny hamlet of Pont d'Aël clusters at its end.
Did you know? The first known description and sketch of the bridge were made by the Savoyard historian Pingone in 1550.
16 Farnese Hercules
Ercole Farnese
Italy · 1.4 km from Naples40.853° N 14.251° E
Rijksmuseum · CC0 The Farnese Hercules shows the strongest man of Greek myth at a moment of total exhaustion. Over life-size and heavily muscled, the hero leans wearily on his knotted club, over which he has thrown the skin of the Nemean lion.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most remarkable ancient places in Italy?
- On our list, Colosseum ranks first, followed by Roman Forum and Castel Sant'Angelo.
- Why has the Pantheon's dome lasted so long?
- Roman builders made the concrete lighter towards the top by using lighter aggregate such as pumice, thinned the shell, and left an open oculus at the crown. Nearly 1,900 years later it is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.
- Are the temples at Paestum Greek or Roman?
- They are Greek. Paestum was founded as Poseidonia by Greek colonists, and its three Doric temples, built in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, are among the best preserved Greek temples anywhere.
- When was Pompeii destroyed?
- Pompeii was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Systematic excavation began in the 18th century and has continued ever since.
- How many ancient places are on this list in Italy?
- The list covers 16 ancient places.