Continued from yesterday”¦ The land the Roman Forums are built on had originally been a swamp between the Palantine and Capitoline hills. It was decided that Rome’s city center needed a more central location, so they built a series of canals that drained the swamp. The original Forum really was the city center — a shopping mall, civic center and religious complex. By 46 BC, the original Forum was too small and expansion started, with emperors trying to build bigger, grander more richly decorated spaces to outshine their predecessors. Like the Colosseum, in the Middle Ages the forums were abandoned and the building marble, blocks and metal for new buildings were often pilfered from the neglected Forums. Since the canals were not being maintained, each year the river would flood and leave silt behind in this marshy area. With the Renaissance came a renewed interest in the classical, and excavations on the area began. The excavations still continue today.

We didn’t actually walk around in the Forums. We stood in place as the guide pointed to various buildings and told us about them. Once again, what he discussed was very informative, but he didn’t tell us about all of them, sometimes we weren’t sure which building he was pointing to, and more often than not, we didn’t catch the name. When the tour was over, we explored the Forum some more. We could have gone back and explored the Palantine some more, as well, but we were feeling lazy and didn’t want to walk back up the hill. We’ll try our best to tell you about the Forums, but in all honesty, we didn’t comprehend much and retained even less. And since there are no signs, without a guide, we would have had zero comprehension.

The entrance on the east side (next to the Colosseum) and the exit at the other end are both flanked by large arches relatively similar to the one devoted to Constatine that we showed above. Each was built to commemorate a war victory.

The picture below is of the Basilica di Messenzio. In the middle ages, they decided to put a church on top of a partially destroyed pagan temple to reclaim the spot for God. Look carefully at the door. The river had silted up so much by the time the church was made that the door was at ground level. The medieval builders tried in vain to pull down the solid marble pillars, but they each weigh more than our boat and were about a third of the way buried, and they just couldn’t bring them down no matter how hard they tried. If you look carefully at the pillars and you can see they left scars from where they tried to pull them down. It says a lot about the erosion of knowledge between the Roman and Medieval eras when they were able to put up ridiculously heavy columns, but not bring them down.

This is the remains of the Temple of Saturn. Not only was it an important temple, it was also the treasury in Julius Caesar’s day, holding vast amounts of wealth.

The pink building towards the back left is called the Curia. It is where the Senate met, and it was reconstructed in 1937. The building to the left is obviously a church, name unknown. To the right are the remains of the Basilica Fulvia Aemilia. In front of the Curia is a piece of black marble that supposedly marks the tomb of Romulus, but you can’t really see it in the photo.

Here is a church that we don’t know the name of. It is interesting because it was built in the medieval times and still has original green doors, complete with original lock and key that still work.

The guide told us that one of the churches in here is a converted temple originally built to honor Emperor Antonio’s wife Faustina upon her death. When Antonio died, rather than building him his own temple, they just added his name to her temple. It really saved a lot on the budget. We’re not sure which one, though.

Here are a few more shots of The Forums. We are not sure what they are of, but it gives you a good idea of what it looks like. In the third photo, the structure goes from the bottom of The Forums all the way up to the top of Palantine hill. It looks like it was built into the hill itself.

We also saw a team of archeologists at work sifting through the dirt, most of them women.

We exited the Forum on the Capitoline Hill side. There are several more sights to see on Capitoline Hill, but we had something else on our agenda for this afternoon. We walked back to the Colosseum along the Imperial Forums, another set of ruins under excavation that parallels The Roman Forums (there is a major highway between the two sets of ruins). Our understanding is that the Imperial Forums are an extension of the Forums we had just seen. It doesn’t look like you can go into the ruins, but you can get a good look from the street. They have a long way to go in the restoration efforts.

The photos are the most intact of all the ruins in the complex. Obviously, the buildings in the background are more modern and not the ancient ruins. The first picture is of Trajan’s Forum, built in 107 AD. The extra tall column to the left with the statue at the top is called Trajan’s Column. It was erected in 113 AD and it houses Emperor Trajan’s and Trajan’s wife’s ashes. It is 100 feet tall and is covered in a spiraling relief depicting war scenes that Trajan fought in. There is an internal spiraling staircase to the top. It is the only thing in Trajan’s Forum that the church didn’t tear down in the Middle Ages, using this column as a steeple for the church they built in the forum’s place. They just switched the statue that was up there for one of St. Peter. As for the other two photos, we aren’t sure what they used to be.

We stopped by the Imperial Forums Visitor Center, near the subway station. It was informative, with extensive information about each building within the Imperial Forums (and there were signs in English!). We wish we found something similar for the Palantine and the Roman Forums. There was also a model of what the whole Imperial Forums complex looked like at its peak, with lots of huge and fancy buildings that seemed to all sort of interconnect to one another through a series of courtyards.

To be continued”¦