Roman Forum site features

You come in at ground level and the ground is twenty feet below the modern city. The Forum sits in a long shallow valley with the traffic of Rome running past above it, and the first thing you register is that you have stepped down out of the present.

It is not a building, it is the floor plan of about forty. Columns stand in ones and threes with nothing on top of them; brick cores rise where the marble facing is gone; stretches of paving run between stumps of wall. Three tall columns carrying a fragment of entablature stand on their own in the middle distance, holding up nothing.

Two arches are complete and they anchor the ends. One at the western end, heavy and triple-arched, covered in carved panels; one at the far eastern end, smaller and plainer, on the rise.

A paved road runs the length of it — worn, rutted, and wide enough for two carts — and almost everything else is arranged along it.

Then the ground climbs. Up the southern side the Palatine rises into terraces and vaulted substructures, with brick arches stacked in storeys and umbrella pines on top. From up there the Forum reads as a plan, and on the other side the Colosseum stands clear above the trees.

The Arch of Septimius Severus

Built at the western end of the square in 203 AD to celebrate the emperor's victories over the Parthians.

The Column of Phocas

Raised in 608 AD for the Byzantine emperor — the last monument ever built in the Forum.

The Comitium

Grown from the archaic Umbilicus Urbis and Vulcanal; where the Senate, and Republican government itself, began.

The Regia and the Temple of Vesta

8th and 7th centuries BC, with the complex of the Vestal Virgins, all rebuilt under the empire.

Maxentius's Basilica

Early 4th century, on the Velia — the last great intervention, and the tallest thing standing.

The Casa dei Grifi

On the Palatine: an aristocratic house of the 2nd–1st centuries BC with exceptional painted and floor decoration.

The Casa di Livia

Part of the dwelling Augustus symbolically chose on the hill.

Why it is called a palace

The imperial palaces on the Palatine produced such an identification that the toponym Palatium became, in modern languages, a synonym for a residential building.