ASIANOVERLAND.NET WINTER EUROPEAN DAY 10/183:  ROME, ITALY

“DAY 10, 21/12/80 ROME

THE POPE

THE VATICAN

PIAZZA VENEZIA

PALATINE HILL

ROMAN FORUM

ARCH OF CONSTANTINE”

The Roman Forum is a rectangular forum (plaza) surrounded by the ruins of  important ancient government buildings at the centre of the city of Rome. Citizens of the ancient city referred to this space, originally a marketplace, as the Forum.

For centuries the Forum was the centre of day-to-day life in Rome, of triumphal processions and elections; the venue for public speeches, criminal trials, and gladiatorial matches; and the nucleus of commercial affairs. Here statues and monuments commemorated the city's great men. The teeming heart of ancient Rome, it has been called the most celebrated meeting place in the world, and in all history. Located in the small valley between the Palatine and Capitoline Hills, the Forum today is a sprawling ruin of architectural fragments and archaeological excavations, one of the best walks in the world.

Many of the oldest and most important structures of ancient Rome were located on or near the Forum. The Roman Kingdom's earliest shrines and temples included the ancient former royal residence, the Regia (8th century BC), and the Temple of Vesta (7th century BC), as well as the surrounding complex of the Vestal Virgins, all of which were rebuilt after the rise of imperial Rome.

Other archaic shrines to the northwest, such as the Senate House, government offices, tribunals, temples, memorials and statues gradually cluttered the Forum.

Julius Caesar built the Basilica Julia, along with the new Curia Julia, refocusing both the judicial offices and the Senate itself. This new Forum, in what proved to be its final form, served as a revitalized city square where the people of Rome gathered for commercial, political, judicial and religious pursuits.

Eventually much economic and judicial business would transfer away from the Forum to the larger and more extravagant structures, like Trajan's Forum. The reign of Constantine the Great saw the construction of the last major expansion of the Forum complex—the Basilica of Maxentius (312 AD) and the Arch of Constantine, which dominated the Forum until the fall of the Western Roman Empire almost two centuries later.

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