Roman Forum

Pottery shows occupation of the valley and its hills in the Final Bronze Age, between 1200 and 975 BC, and in the 10th century BC part of the future Forum was a cemetery, cremated ashes set in urns inside earthenware jars under capstones. Burial there probably ceased in the late 9th century BC, the Esquiline necropolis taking its place, and the earliest finds under the public buildings point to the ground turning from cemetery to public site in the 8th century BC. The marshy valley was drained in the 7th century BC by the first works of the Cloaca Maxima, and tradition has Tarquinius Priscus first paving the square in 600 BC.

The 5th century BC brought the first Forum temples with known building dates: Saturn in 497 BC, Castor and Pollux in 484. The Temple of Saturn worked as a bank as well as a shrine, and Marcus Porcius Cato introduced the earliest basilicas to the Forum in 184 BC.

In 133 BC the tribune Tiberius Gracchus was lynched in the Forum by senators. Under Sulla in the 80s BC the plaza was raised by almost a metre and laid with permanent marble paving. In 63 BC Cicero denounced the companions of Catiline in the Temple of Concord, and after the verdict they were led to their deaths in the Tullianum nearby. In 44 BC Mark Antony gave the funeral oration for Caesar from the partly finished New Rostra, and Caesar's body was burned opposite it; almost two years later Antony had Cicero's severed head and right hand displayed on the same platform.

Augustus completed his great-uncle's work and gave the Forum its final form, adding the Temple of Caesar and the Arch of Augustus in 29 BC. In 69 AD the emperor Galba, too feeble to walk, was carried in a litter to meet rebels and killed by his rival Otho's cavalry near the Lacus Curtius. After Trajan's Forum was built in 110 AD much economic and judicial business moved north to the Basilica Ulpia.

The Arch of Septimius Severus was dedicated in 203 for the Parthian victories of the emperor and his two sons. Diocletian, who reigned from 284 to 305, rebuilt the temples of Saturn and Vesta and the Curia Julia, the best-preserved tetrarchic building in Rome. The Basilica of Maxentius, finished in 312 under Constantine, was the last significant expansion of the complex.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Rome's population fell from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands and the Forum was largely abandoned. From the 6th century its old buildings began to be turned into Christian churches, and on 1 August 608 the Column of Phocas was raised before the Rostra in honour of the Eastern Roman emperor Phocas, the last monumental addition to the site. Sulla's paving survived more or less intact at least until the sack of Rome by Robert Guiscard's Normans in 1084, when neglect finally allowed debris to accumulate unabated. Its structures were dismantled for towers and castles nearby and torn down again in the 13th century; the buried ground was grazed as the Campo Vaccino, the cattle field.

Julius II had the whole area worked over for reusable stone, and the eyewitness Pirro Ligorio reported that a month could suffice to demolish an almost intact building. For the triumph of Charles V in April 1536 the papal authorities cleared some 200 houses and several churches to open a processional route between the arches of Titus and Septimius Severus. In 1540 Paul III placed the site under the Deputies of the Fabric of the new Saint Peter's, who exploited it for stone and marble; the remains of the Arch of Augustus, the Temple of Caesar, the Temple of Vesta and the Regia were among those burned for lime.

Carlo Fea began clearing debris from the Arch of Septimius Severus in 1803 and was Commissioner of Antiquities for some thirty years. State excavation began in 1898 under the minister of public instruction, Baccelli, and was led by Giacomo Boni until his death in 1925. Planners of the Mussolini era removed most of the medieval and Baroque strata and drove the Via dei Fori Imperiali between the Imperial Fora and the Forum.

Pottery and food scraps found since 2009 around a tuff wall near the Lapis Niger date it most likely to the 8th or 9th century BC, over a century before the traditional date of Rome's founding. In 2020 archaeologists uncovered a sarcophagus and a circular altar of the 6th century BC; experts disagree whether it is a memorial tomb to Rome's legendary founder, Romulus. The site is protected as Italian national heritage and draws 4.5 million or more visitors a year.