Roman forums

The forum was the public square of a Roman town. It was first of all a marketplace, with shops around it and colonnades for open stalls, but it was also where people met, talked and argued, and where the town’s public life was carried on. Every Roman municipality had one. In a newly founded town the forum usually lay at or near the crossing of the two main streets, and around it stood temples and a basilica, often with the baths nearby.

The Forum in Rome became the model for new forums. For centuries it was the centre of the city’s daily life: the scene of triumphal processions and elections, of public speeches and criminal trials, and the heart of its commercial and legal business. Today it is, in the words of its English Wikipedia article, “a sprawling ruin of architectural fragments and intermittent archaeological excavations”.

That is what to expect of most forums. A square is open space, so what a visitor sees is the ground of the square and whatever survives of the buildings that once framed it. A modern town square is not necessarily the Roman forum, even where the two seem to line up, since many Italian piazzas were laid out in the Middle Ages. Entries of this type aim to tell you which buildings around the square still stand, which survive only as foundations, and how to walk the site so that it makes sense.