What to see in the Roman Forum: fourteen stops that make sense of the ruins

Short answer: walk the Via Sacra from the Arch of Titus down to the Curia, the Senate house, and stop at the Basilica of Maxentius, the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, the Vestals, the Temple of Caesar, the Basilica Julia, the Rostra and the Arch of Septimius Severus. That takes about an hour and a half at an easy pace. The Forum is the ruin people find hardest to read, because almost nothing stands whole — this page is a way through it.

First, the view from above

If you can, look at the Forum from above before you walk it. The terraces beside the Capitoline Hill and the edge of the Palatine both give you the whole valley at once: the line of the Via Sacra, the columns standing in groups, the Senate house at the far end. Once you have seen the plan, the stones at ground level stop being random.

The upper Forum, from the Arch of Titus

• The Arch of Titus — the model for every triumphal arch since. Inside the passage, the relief shows soldiers carrying the seven-branched menorah taken from the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD.
• The Basilica of Maxentius — only one aisle is left, and it is still overwhelming: concrete vaults that span the space with no columns in the middle, an engineering idea Renaissance architects studied closely.
• The Temple of Romulus — a round brick building that still has its original fourth-century bronze doors.
• The Temple of Antoninus and Faustina — built by an emperor for his dead wife, later turned into a church. Look for the deep grooves high on the columns, left by medieval attempts to pull them down with ropes.

The heart of the Forum

• The House of the Vestals — the courtyard where the six priestesses who kept the sacred fire lived, with statues of senior Vestals still on their pedestals.
• The Temple of Vesta — the round temple where the fire was never allowed to go out.
• The Temple of Caesar — built where Julius Caesar’s body was burned in 44 BC. People still leave flowers in the niche.
• The Temple of Castor and Pollux — three tall columns, the Forum’s best-known silhouette.
• Santa Maria Antiqua — a church buried by an earthquake in the ninth century, which preserved its early medieval frescoes. Often open on a timed basis.

The lower Forum, towards the Capitol

• The Basilica Julia — courts of law, now just a vast floor. Look on the steps for board games scratched into the marble by bored spectators.
• The Column of Phocas — the last monument put up in the Forum, in 608 AD, using a column taken from an older building.
• The Rostra — the speakers’ platform, named after the bronze rams of captured warships that once decorated it.
• The Temple of Saturn — eight columns on a high podium; its basement held the state treasury.
• The Arch of Septimius Severus — read the fourth line of the inscription: the name of Geta was chiselled out after his brother Caracalla had him killed.
• The Curia — the Senate house, the one building that survives with its roof, because it was turned into a church. The bronze doors are copies; the originals are at St John Lateran.

Easy to walk past

Under a shelter near the Curia lies the Lapis Niger, a patch of black stone over an archaic shrine with one of the oldest known Latin inscriptions. In the Basilica Aemilia, green stains on the floor are said to be bronze coins melted into the marble when the Goths burned the city in 410. Neither has a sign worth the name.

Practical

The Forum and the Palatine are on the same ticket as the Colosseum, with one entry to the area. There is almost no shade, so in summer go early. The paving of the Via Sacra is ancient and uneven; wear proper shoes.

Updated 2026-10-27