Roman Forum, Rome

The centre of the world

The Forum was the heart of Rome and therefore of an empire of fifty to sixty million people. Elections, trials, triumphal processions, sacrifices, funerals and public speeches all happened in this one crowded valley, among temples, law courts and the Senate House.

To stand here in 120 AD was, in a real sense, to stand at the centre of the Western world.

Read in marble

By Hadrian's day the Forum was a showpiece of centuries of building, packed so tightly that emperors competed for space.

Painted marble facades, gilded bronze roof tiles, honorific columns and triumphal arches crowded together. Just to the north, Trajan's Column, finished in 113, spiralled some 30 metres of carved relief narrating the conquest of Dacia, and Trajan's Forum and Markets formed the grandest civic complex the city ever built.

From heart to cow field

After Rome fell, the Forum was quarried for its marble, buried under flood silt and rubble, and slowly forgotten.

By the Middle Ages it had become pasture (the Romans called it the Campo Vaccino, the "cow field"), grazed by cattle among half-buried columns. Systematic excavation from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries uncovered it again. Today it is one of the most visited ruins on Earth, but the bare stone tells little of the painted, gilded, deafeningly busy heart of empire it once was.