Rome walks: how to visit properly the Roman Forum

ROME WALKS: HOW TO VISIT PROPERLY THE ROMAN FORUM

A good way to see the Roman Forum is to walk around it counterclockwise from the entrance on Via dei Fori Imperiali, stopping to examine the remains of certain buildings, and giving oneself over to imagining some of the events and individuals associated with those places. A path descends from the modern street level, which is anywhere from twenty-four to seventy-two feet above that of ancient pavements, to a spot where the basilica Aemilia is on the right and the temple of Antoninus and Faustina on the left.

The latter is the kind of structure that seems surprising when first encountered in Rome but proves typical of this multilayered city. The emperor Antoninus Pius, built the original temple in the mid- second century AD in honor of his deified wife, Faustina, and after his death it was dedicated to him as well. Across the front are ten marble columns, with an inscription above giving the names of the couple. The temple survived because in the eleventh century Christian builders incorporated it into a church, San Lorenzo in Miranda. The front wall was rebuilt in early 1600s; behind the ancient roman columns stands the curving, rosecolored brick facade of a baroque church.

To the right, looking west toward the Capitoline hill, are the remains of one of the oldest building in the forum, the basilica Aemilia. Although little is left of the immense structure ( 325 feet long ) except for a restored segment of the south wall and the stumps of some columns, the rectangular shape of this law court, founded in 179 BC by M. Aemilius Lepidus and M. Fulvius Nobilior, is still visible. Repeatedly rebuilt over the centuries, most of it disappeared in the renaisance, when builders used its remaining marble to construct Christian buildings. The central path of the Roman Forum is acalled Via Sacra. In antiquity horders of people crowded it every day as they went about their business in the Forum.

It also served as ceremonial route, along which each of Rome's generals, awarded a triumph by the Senate for military victories, passed in a splendid procession on his way to make sacrifices at the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. His head crowned with laurel leaves on his face painted in red in honor of Mars, the god of war, the general rode in a chariot, preceded by captives and soldiers carrying the spoils of war and followed by his victorious army. Century after century, generals and emperors marched along this road, as Rome conquered first her neighbors and then the regions around the mediterranean Sea and beyond.

Continuing west, past the basilica Aemilia, one comes to the Comitium and the Senate House, or Curia, sites of the earliest political activity of the Roman republic. The Comitium was the original open -air-meeting place where the representatives of the city's Curiae, or districts, recorded their votes. To the north of the Comitium stands the tall and imposing Senate house, in a seememngly miraculous state of preservation. It is not the original senate, built in the seventh century BC, of course. The present structure dates from the first century AD and was repaired by the emperor Diocletian after the fire of 283 AD. What preserved it was its conversion into a church in the seventh century. When the archaeologists removed the Christian shell in the 1930s, they found the ancient brick building almost intact within it; even the magnificent colored marble pavement had been preserved beneath the Christian church of saint hadrian.

From this simple building Rome's senate ruled the republic, assisted by two annually elected consuls. After Constantine the emperors no longer spent much time in Rome, but senators declaimed and droned on amid the crumbling buildings of the Forum well into the seventh century. The immense bronze doors, cast during Diocletian's restoration of the senate House, were removed in the mid-1600s and now adorn the main entrance of Rome's cathedral, St John Lateran.

Past the senate to the southwest stands the richly decorated Arch of Septimius Severus, behind which rises the capitoline Hill. The arch was a relatively late addition to the Forum, constructed in 203 AD in honor of some military victories of that ambitious North African-born emperor and dedicated to him and his sons, Geta and Caracalla. Nine years after the construction of the arch Caracalla killed Geta and had his brother's name removed from his and every other monument in Rome on which it appeared. But the inscription a the arche's top, altered to remove the mention of Geta, still preserves a ghostly memory of the murdered man.

To the left of the Arch of Septius Severus is a long, low platform with a stone base. This is the Rostra, the place where orators stood to address audiences in the Forum and from which proclamations of the senate were read to the poeple. It gets its name from the curved metal ramming prows of ships captured in battle which were displayed there. In front of the Rostra on the left is the last monument erected in the Forum- the tall white column on a brick base, set up in 608 AD in honor of the Byzantine emperor Phocas. The splendid column was probably placed here in gratitude to Phocas for his extraordinary gift to Boniface IV: the emperor had given to the pope the Pantheon.

Behind the Rostra and to the south of a low, semicircular wall constructed during the building of the Arch of of Septimius Severus, is the site of the now vanished Miliarium Aureum: the Golden Milestone, put in place by the emperor Augustus about 20 BC This was a stone column covered with a gilded bronze and engraved with the names of the principla cities of the empire and supposed to converge on this spot. Although not all of them did, the existence of the Golden Milestone has given us the enduring expression " all roads lead to Rome".

At the western end of the Forum rises the plain, monumental facade of the Tabularium, built into the rocky flank of the capitoline Hill in 78 BC. It served as ancient Rome's record office, the depository of the clay and stone tablets and parchment scrolls that formed the state archives. Built of huge rough stone blocks, it always must have looked like a fortress. The two surviving stories now serve as the base for a medieval building that was first a family fortress and later Palazzo Senatorio, where the city's medieval senate met, beginning about 1150. The portion that faces away from the Forum, now covered by a facade designed by Michelangelo, forms part of the renaissance reconstruction of the capitoline Hill.

To the left of Titus' temple are eight gray granite columns, all that remain of the temple of Saturn. One of the oldest temples in Rome, it was first built in 498 BC, probably over an even more ancient shrine. What we see today are the remains of a building of the first century BC, so carelessly reconstructed after the fire of 283 AD, that one of the columns were replaced upside down. Saturn was originally an agricultural deity, the guardian of the primitive wealth of fields and flocks: in historic times he was the god who guarded money. His temple was the site of the state treasury.

Between the temples of Vespasian and of Saturn, an extension of the Via Sacra called Clivus Capitolinus continues up the capitoline Hill, toward the temple of Jupiter. The Via Sacra continues east, passes the Mamertine prison and leads you the to the Forum of Julius Caesar. Although he presided over the inauguration of the basilica in 46 BC, he did not live to see it completed.
Although Julius Caesar never held the title of emperor and several times refused to be crowned king, the name Caesar became so closely identified with the power and authority that the subsequent rulers of Rome always included in their titles and it has entered several modern languages as a synonym for imperial ruler: Kaizer in german, Czar in Russian.

Next to the east side of the basilica Julia is the temple of Castor and Pollux, built in honor of the two twins sons of Jupiter who according to the legend helped the Romans win a great battle against the Tarquins. Three tall and graceful fluted columns connected by a bit of the entablature are all that remain.

To the north site of this temple there is another monument worth seeing one in Rome: the memorial dedicated to Julius Caesar. Built in 29 BC it marks the place where the body of the most famous roman general was cremated and where Marc Antony gave funeral oration best known to English-speaking people in Shakespeare's version. Here thousands of mourning Romans gathered to pay homage to their fallen leader. Even though little survives other than the restored round altar stone where the cremation took place, this spot is one of the most evocative in the Forum, a place where history seems to hang in the air.

Just past the south west corner of caesar's temple the via sacra angles slightly to the left and passes between the regia on the left and the temple of Vesta on the right. The Regia was the official residence of the Pontifex Maximus, the roman chief priest, and also the site of the city's religious archives. Archaeologists have found structures here dating back to the seventh century BC, and below those the remains of prehistoric huts.

To the south, across the Via sacra from the regia, stands a reconstructed segment of the circular temple of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth and of the sacred fire that symbolized the continuity of the Roman state. The cult of Vesta was among the oldest and most important in Rome and probably dates from long before the founding of the city. The temple's round shape preserves the form of a conical hut, perhaps the kind which sheltered the communal fire of the region's prehistoric hill dwellers. The remains we see today are from a rebuilding of the third century AD sponsored by Julia Domna, empress and wife of Septimius Severus.

The guardians of the temple's sacred fire were the six vestal virgins. Chosen as children by the Pontifex Maximus among the city's aristocratic families, they served for thirty years under strict vows of chastity. Thier most important duty was to tend the sacred fire and make sure it never went out. The fire's extinction was considered the most fearful of calamities because it portended the destruction of Rome. Within the temple they also guarded the adytum, a sacred place containing the city's most sacred objects, like the Palladium,which the Romans believed were the source of their city's power and prosperity. The Palladium refers to the ancient image of Athena, supposedly brought from Troy by Aeneas .It symbolized the Roman's noble heritage, since Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of the city, were descendants of Aeneas.

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