Roman Forum

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. For centuries this cramped rectangle, about 130 by 50 metres at its imperial peak, was the heart of ancient Rome, and around four and a half million people a year now walk through what is left.

What is left is a field of fragments from every age of the city, and the pleasure is in reading them. At the Capitoline end, the white marble Arch of Septimius Severus, dedicated in 203 AD for victories over Parthia, stands beside the Curia Julia, the senate house begun by Julius Caesar, and the eight surviving columns of the Temple of Saturn, a temple first dedicated in 497 BC and rebuilt in 42 BC. Along the long sides lay the Basilica Aemilia and the Basilica Julia, the halls of the law courts, whose outlines still frame the square. The Temple of Castor and Pollux goes back to 484 BC. At the south-eastern edge lie the oldest sacred places of all: the Temple of Vesta, the house of the Vestal Virgins and the Regia, the house of the early kings. At the far end the Arch of Titus closes the view, and the Basilica of Maxentius, completed in 312 AD under Constantine, was the last great building added here.

Some spots carry specific memories. Caesar's body was burned in the Forum in 44 BC after Mark Antony's funeral speech, and in 29 BC Augustus raised the Temple of Caesar beside the site of the pyre. Near the Curia, a patch of black marble paving, the Lapis Niger, covers one of the oldest sacred spots of the archaic city.

After the empire fell the Forum was buried under silt and rubble and used as grazing land, the Campo Vaccino. Renaissance popes quarried it hard, above all in the 1540s when Paul III took its marble for the new St Peter's. Clearance began in 1803 at the Arch of Septimius Severus, and systematic state excavation from 1898; digging continues today. The travertine paving laid under Augustus is still visible, and the line of the Via Sacra, the road of the triumphal processions, still runs through the ruins between the two arches.

Getting there

The Forum lies in the centre of Rome, between the Capitoline and Palatine hills and next to the Colosseum. Colosseo station on Lines B and C of the Rome Metro is a short walk away. Ciampino airport (CIA) is about 14 km away.