The Most Remarkable Ancient Places in Lazio
10 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable ancient places in Lazio are Colosseum, Roman Forum and Castel Sant'Angelo. The list covers 10 ancient places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Lazio is the ancient Latium, the land of the Latins, and it was from here that a small city on the Tiber grew to rule the Mediterranean. The region's ancient heritage is therefore not one site among many but the centre of the Roman world: the temples, forums and imperial monuments of the capital, the port of Ostia, Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, and, older still, the Etruscan cemeteries of Cerveteri and Tarquinia to the north. Roman engineering in concrete and brick allowed buildings of a size no earlier civilisation had attempted, and many still stand.
The Colosseum, opened in AD 80, held tens of thousands of spectators for games and hunts. Beside it, the Roman Forum was for centuries the political and religious heart of the city, and Trajan's Column, dedicated in AD 113, winds a carved frieze of the Dacian Wars around its shaft. The Baths of Caracalla show the scale of imperial public building in the early third century.
Some ancient buildings survived by changing purpose. The Pantheon, rebuilt under Hadrian, has been a church since 609, and its unreinforced concrete dome is still the largest of its kind in the world. Hadrian's own mausoleum became Castel Sant'Angelo, a papal fortress connected to the Vatican by a fortified corridor. The Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore keeps fifth-century mosaics in its nave, among the oldest Christian mosaics in Rome.
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 | Trajan's Market | Ruins | |
| 7 | Baths of Caracalla | Thermae | |
| 8 | Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore | Church building | ✓ |
| 9 | Pantheon, Rome | Archaeological site | |
| 10 | Domus Aurea | Ruins |
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 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.
07 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.
08 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.
09 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.
10 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.
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 Lazio?
- On our list, Colosseum ranks first, followed by Roman Forum and Castel Sant'Angelo.
- How old is the Pantheon in Rome?
- The building that stands today was constructed under Emperor Hadrian around AD 113 to 125, replacing an earlier temple built by Agrippa. It has been in continuous use and became a church in 609.
- What was Castel Sant'Angelo originally?
- It was built as the mausoleum of Emperor Hadrian in the second century AD. In the Middle Ages it was turned into a fortress and later served the popes as a refuge and prison.
- How many people could the Colosseum hold?
- Estimates range from about 50,000 to 80,000 spectators, seated by social rank on tiers rising around the arena.
- How many ancient places are on this list in Lazio?
- The list covers 10 ancient places.