Roman Forum

The Roman Forum stands in a shallow valley between the Palatine and Capitoline Hills at the heart of Rome. Once a marshy lake drained by the Tarquins’ Cloaca Maxima, it became the city’s principal public square. For centuries it served as the stage for triumphal processions, elections, criminal trials and gladiatorial matches. Statues and monuments here commemorated Rome’s leaders, and the Senate began its sessions in the Comitium on the Forum’s north-western edge. By the Imperial period the open space had shrunk to a rectangle of about 130 by 50 metres, framed by the Basilica Aemilia and Basilica Julia. The Forum’s long organic growth began with 8th-century BC shrines such as the Regia and the Temple of Vesta. Julius Caesar built the Curia Julia and Basilica Julia, refocusing both Senate and law courts. Constantine’s Basilica of Maxentius marked the last major expansion before the Forum’s political role faded. Triumphs followed the Via Sacra into the square, ending with lavish banquets and the climb up the Clivus Capitolinus to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Today the Forum is a sprawling ruin of marble fragments and intermittent excavations. Visitors walk over the final travertine paving laid in Augustus’s reign, its surface raised by centuries of Tiber floods and hillside sediments. Along the edges stand the ruins of the Regia, the Temple of Vesta and the Arch of Titus, while the Via Sacra still traces the path of ancient processions. The layered remains, some 3.6 metres below modern ground level, reveal one civilisation built upon another.