Column of Marcus Aurelius site features

The Column of Marcus Aurelius is a single grey-white marble shaft standing alone at the centre of a busy rectangular square in the middle of Rome, and the first thing to take in is the proportion: it is about thirty metres tall — roughly a ten-storey building — and slender enough that your eye runs straight up it before it registers anything else.

The whole surface is carved. From a few metres above the ground to the capital, an unbroken spiral band of relief winds round the shaft, with roughly a hand's-breadth of figures per turn: soldiers, horses, river crossings, palisades, siege works, cut deep enough to throw hard shadows. Close up the marble is pitted and grey-brown with two thousand years of weather; the figures read as texture rather than faces.

It is built, not quarried whole. The shaft is made of 28 cylindrical blocks of Luna marble stacked one on another, and the horizontal joints between the drums are visible all the way up, cutting across the spiral.

The base is plain and the top is not Roman. Below, a 12-metre base of plinth and basement stands blank — its reliefs and its inscription are gone. Above, past a Doric capital ringed by a small iron balustrade, stands a green-bronze figure of Saint Paul, dark against the sky and visible from the far end of the square.

The setting is ordinary Rome, which is part of the effect. Palazzo Chigi stands on one side and ochre and brick-red facades on the others; buses pass along the Corso a few metres away. There is no enclosure, no barrier worth noting and no ticket desk — the column simply stands in the road pattern, as it has since the second century.

The spiral frieze

Relief carved in a series of spiral turns recording the campaigns against the Germans (172-173) and the Sarmatians (174-175).

The Danube crossing

The first scene, at the foot of the spiral: the army crossing the Danube on a bridge of boats.

The winged Victory

She separates the German campaign from the Sarmatian one.

The 28 drums

Cylindrical blocks of Luna marble, the white marble of Carrara, stacked to full height.

The internal staircase

A spiral stair lit by slits runs up inside the shaft.

The bronze Saint Paul

Placed on the summit in 1589, when Domenico Fontana restored the column for Sixtus V.

The blank base

The basement reliefs were lost in that same restoration, and the honorific inscription has vanished.

The wrong inscription

The basement carries an inscription wrongly attributing the column to Antoninus Pius — the origin of the name Colonna Antonina.