Ostia

Ostia Antica is the ancient harbour city of Rome, and after Pompeii and Herculaneum it is the best-preserved Roman town in Italy. Over some 150 hectares, streets lined with brick apartment blocks several storeys high, shops with their counters, warehouses, taverns, bakeries, baths and temples give a picture of everyday urban life that the city of Rome itself, rebuilt over and over, cannot offer. Floors of black-and-white and coloured mosaic, painted walls and the theatre built under Agrippa survive, and about two thirds of the town has still never been excavated.

Roman tradition credited the foundation of Ostia, whose name comes from the Latin word for mouth, to King Ancus Marcius, and an inscription appears to place a first fort here in the seventh century BC, although the oldest remains so far discovered date from the fourth century BC. The walls of the rectangular castrum of the third century BC are among the earliest structures still visible. Ostia served as a naval base during the Punic Wars and then became the gateway for the grain that fed Rome. It was plundered by Marius in 87 BC and sacked by pirates in 68 BC, an attack that so alarmed Rome that Pompey was given extraordinary powers to clear the seas; the walls were built soon afterwards. Under the emperors the city flourished. Claudius and Trajan built a new artificial harbour, Portus, to the north, while Ostia remained the administrative centre of the grain supply and in the second century AD may have had around 50,000 inhabitants. Hadrian, who twice held the town's chief magistracy, rebuilt much of it, and the forum with its Capitolium, the temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, took its present form under him, while the Forum Baths were added under Antoninus Pius.

The city was cosmopolitan: eighteen shrines of Mithras have been found, as well as a synagogue, likely built in the late first century AD, which is the oldest yet identified in Europe. Saint Monica, the mother of Augustine of Hippo, died here in 387 while waiting to sail back to Africa. In late antiquity Ostia became a residential town for the wealthy, with marble-lined houses such as the Domus of Cupid and Psyche, but after the fall of the Western Empire it declined, and its last inhabitants left in the ninth century. Silt from the Tiber has since pushed the shoreline about 3 km away, and drifting sand covered the ruins, which were long used as a quarry for marble before systematic excavation in the twentieth century.

Getting there

The ruins lie about 25 km southwest of central Rome and about 2.6 km from Lido di Ostia, the nearest town; Ostia Antica station on the Rome–Lido railway is close to the entrance. The nearest airport is Rome Fiumicino Airport (FCO), about 6 km away.