Roman Forum

Roman Forum lies in the valley between the Capitoline and Palatine hills, where Rome’s early marshland was drained and, from the 7th c. BC, shaped into the Republic’s main public square. Temples, basilicas, and the Curia anchored law, commerce, and ritual, while processional routes and triumphal arches turned politics into spectacle and memory. After antiquity it faded into the medieval Campo Vaccino before 18th–19th c. excavations exposed its layered ruins, still read worldwide as the city’s civic and symbolic core.