Ancona

Is it worth the trip?

For the arch, yes. It is among the best-preserved honorary arches of its time (it.wikipedia), it costs nothing to see, and it stands where it always has, on the quay of a working port. Add the walk up the Guasco hill to the amphitheatre and the cathedral and the museum below them, and Roman Ancona fits comfortably into half a day on foot, since all of it lies within about 300 m of the cathedral.

Set expectations for the rest. The amphitheatre is a partly excavated ruin hemmed in by later houses, not a standing arena, and its interior opens only on scheduled days; from the street you see its wall and gate. The temple is a set of foundations under a church.

Getting there

The arch is on the harbour quay below the old town; the cathedral, the amphitheatre and the museum are on and around the Guasco hill above it. A bus stop named Duomo - Cattedrale San Ciriaco is mapped about 35 m from the cathedral, a free car park about 150 m away and a paid one about 170 m away, and public toilets about 85 m away (OpenStreetMap).

The arch can be seen at any time. The museum opens Tuesday to Thursday 08.30–13.30, Friday and Saturday 08.30–19.30 and Sunday 14.00–19.30, and is closed on Mondays, with last entry 45 minutes before closing. A ticket is €5 (reduced €2), and €8 buys the museum together with a visit to the amphitheatre on the days it is open; under-18s go free, and the museum is free on the first Sunday of every month (the operator, as published in March 2026). The operator’s amphitheatre timetable could not be read, so ask the museum (+39 071 202602) which days the amphitheatre opens before planning around it. The cathedral is a working church; visit outside services.

History

Greeks from Syracuse founded Ankon in 387 BC on an existing trading post, and it stayed a Greek-speaking city for some three centuries (it.wikipedia, Ankón; Pleiades). It came into Rome’s orbit gradually: in 178 BC it let Rome use its harbour as a base against Illyrian piracy, in 133 BC a Latin colony was settled on its land, and after the Social War, in 90 BC, it became a Roman municipium (it.wikipedia). Roman writers still called it “Dorica Ancon”, and Catullus and Juvenal both name its temple of Venus, the Roman name for Aphrodite (it.wikipedia).

How old the temple is remains open. Its foundations were found in 1932 and fully excavated in 1948, after war damage to the cathedral. One reconstruction makes it a Doric temple of the 4th century BC, from the city’s Greek foundation; another a Corinthian temple on a podium of the 2nd century BC, a Roman type, on the strength of quarry marks in Latin letters; a third has it rebuilt from the one to the other (it.wikipedia). A Christian basilica was built over it in the 6th century (en.wikipedia, Ancona Cathedral).

The amphitheatre is thought to date in its core from the reign of Augustus and to have been enlarged under Trajan; some of the squared masonry in its southern side may come from an earlier Greek theatre (it.wikipedia). Trajan enlarged the port at his own expense, and the Senate and people of Rome thanked him with the arch, as its inscription says; it is attributed to the architect Apollodorus of Damascus (it.wikipedia). Its date is debated: the inscription points to completion in 117, and the city’s sign at the arch gives 115, but the arch already appears in scene 58 of Trajan’s Column, where Trajan sets sail from Ancona for the Dacian war of 105. Recent studies resolve this with an arch built around AD 100, topped by statues of three gods of the sea, ports and travellers, and rededicated in 114–115 with bronze statues of Trajan, his wife Plotina and his sister Marciana (it.wikipedia). The bronzes, the letters of the inscriptions and the ship’s rams that decorated it were carried off by Saracen raiders in the 9th century; published dates for the raid differ, 839 or 848 (it.wikipedia, en.wikipedia).

The amphitheatre was abandoned, it seems, in the 6th century, when burials were made in its seating, and was built over in the following centuries (it.wikipedia). The abbot Antonio Leoni recognised it in 1810 in the cellars of Palazzo Bonarelli; excavations ran for two years from 1811, and again from the 1930s and after the 1972 earthquake, and in 2025 it joined the national network of state museums, with regular openings and new excavations planned (it.wikipedia). The arch had its own place in the rediscovery of antiquity: in 1421 Cyriac of Ancona, then thirty, copied its inscription from the restorers’ scaffolding, the first of the many he recorded on his travels (it.wikipedia).