Roman Forum

Long before it became the ceremonial heart of Rome, the valley between the Palatine and Capitoline hills was a low, marshy stretch of ground, prone to flooding and used as a burial site by the small Iron Age settlements that would later merge into the city. Roman tradition credits the Etruscan kings of the 6th century BC with draining it by channelling the water into the Cloaca Maxima, a covered sewer whose route can still partly be traced today, turning the swamp into solid, buildable land. On that reclaimed ground grew the political, religious and commercial heart of the Roman world, anchored by buildings whose names still echo in modern languages: the Curia Julia, where the Senate met; the Rostra, the platform from which magistrates addressed the crowd; and the Temple of Saturn, which doubled for centuries as the state treasury.

For over a thousand years, emperor after emperor added arches, basilicas and temples to the Forum, layering monument on monument. After the fall of the Western Empire, the site slowly emptied out: stone and marble were carted off for other buildings, the nearby Tiber flooded it repeatedly, and centuries of silt and debris gradually buried everything but the tips of a few columns. By the Middle Ages it had become, quite literally, pastureland, known to Romans as Campo Vaccino, the "cow field," and it stayed that way until archaeologists began systematic excavations in the early 19th century. That work continued, controversially, in the 1930s under Mussolini, whose regime drove a new road, Via dei Fori Imperiali, straight through part of the adjoining Imperial Fora to link the Colosseum with Piazza Venezia.