Foro Romano

A drained swamp became the stage on which Rome ran itself for over a thousand years. Walking the Forum's paving today, you pass the Senate's curia, triumphal arches, the hearth of Vesta and the shell of a vast basilica — the place where the city's religion, law and ambition were performed in public.

Why it matters

The Foro Romano was the centre of Roman public life for more than a millennium, in the phrasing of the archaeological park that manages it. The valley was originally marshland; reclaimed from the late seventh century BC, it accumulated the buildings through which the Republic and the Empire governed — temples, law courts, Senate house, triumphal route. The ruins are not a romantic scatter but a working civic core that explains itself as you walk it: the Curia Julia still stands to roof height, the Arch of Septimius Severus marks the western end, the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina survives because it became a church, and the triple-arched stump of the Basilica of Maxentius shows the scale of Roman engineering at its most confident.

What to notice

Begin with the ground plan in front of you rather than a list: the Via Sacra climbs through the middle, and the monuments line it in chronological argument. The Curia Julia, the Senate house, is the best-preserved large building in the Forum — its survival owes much to its conversion into the church of Sant'Adriano. Facing the Vestal complex, the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina stands on improbably tall columns; look up where the baroque church facade perches on the ancient podium, an architectural palimpsest in one view. Near the foot of the Palatine, the Arch of Titus commemorates the Jerusalem campaign in a single bay, its inner relief carrying the temple spoils. The Arch of Septimius Severus, raised in 203 AD for victories over the Parthians, anchors the far end. Do not miss the dark circular Temple of Vesta and the House of the Vestals with its statue-lined courtyard, or the squat Column of Phocas of 608 AD — the last monument ever added here.

Context and history

The valley between the Capitoline and Palatine hills began as waterlogged ground; its drainage, associated in tradition with the Cloaca Maxima, allowed the Forum to form from the end of the seventh century BC, and it remained the city's administrative and ceremonial heart as it filled first with political, religious and commercial buildings, then — from the second century BC — with the civil basilicas where courts sat. By the end of the Republic the space was already too small for an empire's capital, and emperors answered both with imperial fora nearby and with prestige monuments inside the old square: the temples of Vespasian and Titus and of Antoninus Pius and Faustina honouring deified emperors, Septimius Severus's arch in 203, and finally Maxentius's early-fourth-century works, the Temple of Romulus and the great basilica on the Velia. After antiquity the ground became pasture, known as Campo Vaccino, while some buildings survived as churches — the Curia as Sant'Adriano, the Temple of Romulus as Santi Cosma e Damiano. Systematic excavation developed during the nineteenth century, before Italian unification, and continued after it, and the area is now managed by the Parco archeologico del Colosseo.