Ostia AnticaOstia Antica

Ostia Antica is the long-buried harbor city that once supplied imperial Rome, traditionally founded in the 7th c. BC at the Tiber’s mouth and reshaped into a dense commercial town in the 1st–2nd cc. Its basalt-paved Decumanus runs past warehouses, guild baths, and columbarium tombs where brickwork, opus reticulatum, and stark black-and-white mosaics turn everyday systems—work, water, trade, and death—into archaeology. As silting shifted the river and coast, the port declined, preserving a rare, street-level portrait of Roman urban life beyond the capital.