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We’d had so much fun seeing sights as we strolled about Rome yesterday, we decided to walk to the forum. Besides, walking gave us a great excuse to stop and enjoy cafes :).
Our route took us past the Trevi Fountain. So of course, we had to stop and take a few more pictures.
Moving on, we kept running into all sorts of interesting sculptures and buildings.
Approaching the forum from our hotel, you first run into giant monuments and buildings dedicated to the formation of the Italian state in the 19th century. The gentleman on the horse is Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of Italy.
We ended up touring the forums mostly in reverse chronological order based on where we entered. The most recent one, the one whose ruins we walked through first, was Trajan’s Forum.
One of the things I’d forgotten is that while people often speak of the Roman forum, there actually are five Roman forums. To make matters worse, the oldest forum is also often referred to as the Roman Forum. Which it was, for quite a long period of time, basically from the founding of the Roman Republic to its fall.
There were a lot of underground passageways linking the various forums, some of which have been restored and made accessible. It’s fun walking through them, wondering what the people who used them day to day were thinking back when they used them.
BTW, this is another example of where I used Photoshop’s new AI capabilities to remove a couple of people from the background of the shot. If you look carefully, you’ll notice some shadows that don’t have any corresponding objects casting them.
As you walk through the forums, there are lots of columns around. Some have been restored to their original vertical orientation, but many of them are simply lying on the ground.
That’s because there have been different styles of restoration over the time during which the restoration work was done.
A couple of things hit me as I walked through these ruins.
First, the ratio of brick to mortar used by the Romans is much greater than ours. The mortar is generally about as thick as the bricks they bind together.
Second, what you’re seeing is missing almost all of the beautiful marble (and other stone) that used to form the surface of the structures. It was all “mined” over the centuries after the collapse of the Empire. In some cases, it was smelted down into lime (!!).
We eventually made it to the earliest forum, which is overlooked by the Palatine Hill.
We climbed the hill, past that impressive arch, so we could see the entire forum complex laid out before us. The views were impressive!
Heading back to our hotel, we walked past one last forum, constructed by the Emperor Nerva. It’s separated from the rest of the complex, at least nowadays, by a road, Via dei Fori Imperiali.
And with that (well, and yet another fine Italian dinner and an evening visit to the Spanish Steps) our Italian tour was over.
