Rome - Roman Forum Foro Romano

No other site in Europe is so pregnant with history as the Roman Forum. Although the surviving remains give only a very inadequate impression of the splendor of the Forum in ancient times, this area at the foot of the Capitol and the Palatine, with its columns still standing erect or lying tumbled on the ground, its triumphal arches and its remains of walls, still have the power to impress, for it was here during many centuries that the fate of Europe was decided.

For more than a thousand years the might of Rome, the magnificence of Roman art, Roman law and Roman religion found imposing and enduring expression here. The history of the Forum was, over this long period, the history of Rome and of the western world. Originally a marshy area between the hills of Rome, it was later drained. The first buildings erected here were temples, soon followed by various public buildings, and the area became the political center of the city, the meeting-place of the Roman courts and the assemblies which took decisions on the internal and external affairs of the republic. This in turn led to the building of market halls in which the citizens of Rome could go about their business. The Forum thus developed into a complex of buildings serving the purposes of Rome's religious, political and commercial life, increasing in splendor as the city grew in power. Consuls and senators, Caesar and later the Emperors vied with one another in developing and embellishing this focal point of the Roman world which became the meeting-place of the peoples of Europe and the Empire. By the end of the Imperial period the Forum was a densely built-up complex in which "modern" buildings rubbed shoulders with ancient ones, carefully planned structures with casually sited later buildings. Not surprisingly, it is sometimes difficult to identify individual buildings in the huddle of the surviving remains.

The last monument erected in ancient times was the undecorated column set up in A.D. 608 for the Byzantine Emperor Phocas. Thereafter the buildings fell into ruin, and the Forum began to be used for other purposes. Churches and fortresses were built amid the ancient remains, and the area served as a quarry of building stone and a pasturage for cows, becoming known as the Campo Vaccino. It was not until the 18th and 19th centuries that systematic excavations brought the ancient buildings to light under a layer of earth and rubble between 10m/30ft and 15m/50ft deep.

It needs a good deal of imagination (and small-scale plaster models) to summon up a picture of the Forum in Imperial times; but the site, even in its state of ruin, still retains a powerful evocative force. The entire area, however, suffers from heavy traffic surging around it, and plans are being made to impose traffic restrictions around the site and in the nearby Via dei Fori Imperiali.