Temple of Antoninus and Faustina

Feel the stones under your feet. These are the uneven, worn paving blocks of the Sacred Way, the oldest road through the Roman Forum. Now lift your eyes. In front of you rise tall columns of greenish, streaked marble, holding up a weathered Roman porch. Above and behind them sits something unexpected: a Baroque church front, pale and tidy, set right into the ancient temple. Two worlds stand in one building, and nobody has ever torn either of them down.

This is the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina. Its story begins with grief. Antoninus Pius ruled Rome in the middle of the second century, during one of the calmest stretches the empire ever knew. His wife, Faustina, known today as Faustina the Elder, died early in his reign. The emperor did not simply mourn her. He asked the Senate to declare her divine. Then, in 141, he built this temple in her honour, right on the main ceremonial street of the city.

Read the inscription across the top of the porch. The Latin letters are still sharp. The lower line names Faustina as a goddess. The upper line was added later. When Antoninus himself died, around twenty years after his wife, the Senate made him a god as well. They rededicated the temple to the couple together. So the inscription shows a small piece of history in stone — first a monument for one person, then a shared memorial for husband and wife.

Look closely at the columns. There are ten of them, six across the front and more along the sides. Each one is a single shaft of cipollino marble. The name means little onion in Italian, because the wavy green and white bands look like the layers of a sliced onion. This stone came from the Greek island of Euboea. Moving such long, heavy pieces across the sea and up into the Forum was a huge feat of Roman engineering.

Here is a detail most visitors miss. Look high up on the columns, near the tops. You will see deep diagonal grooves cut into the marble. The usual explanation is that medieval builders tied ropes or chains around the columns and tried to pull them down, to reuse the stone. The columns held. The ropes cut grooves instead. Whether every scar comes from that effort is hard to prove, but the marks are real, and you can see them clearly from the ground.

Now follow the line above the columns to the frieze. Carved into the marble you can find griffins, the mythical creatures with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. They face each other in pairs, with decorative vases and plant scrolls between them. In Roman art, griffins often guarded sacred things. Here they still keep watch over the porch, softened by many centuries of rain, smoke, and sun.

So why does this temple survive when so much of the Forum lies in pieces? The answer is the church inside it. In the early Middle Ages, the temple became a Christian church, San Lorenzo in Miranda. It was dedicated to Saint Lawrence, a deacon of Rome who was martyred in the third century. Locals long said that Lawrence was tried near this spot. That is a tradition rather than a proven fact. But the church gave the old building a purpose, and buildings with a purpose tend to stay standing.

The church front you see behind the columns is much younger than the temple. It dates from the early seventeenth century, in the Baroque style — the dramatic, theatrical style that spread through Rome in that period. Architects fitted the new facade inside the space of the old temple, behind the Roman porch. The effect is strange and beautiful. You look through a screen of imperial columns at a Christian church front, as if the past had been folded into the present.

And here is the second surprise. Look at the church door. It hangs high above the ground, far above the base of the columns. That is not a design choice. When the church was built, the Forum floor had risen by many metres, buried under soil, rubble, and centuries of debris. The church door sat at the street level of that time. Later, archaeologists dug the Forum back down to its Roman level. The door stayed where it was, now floating in the air.

The steps you see leading up to the porch help you picture the original approach. Roman worshippers climbed a broad staircase to reach the columns and the inner room, where a statue of the deified couple would have stood. Today the steps are a modern reconstruction in brick, built on the ancient footprint. They let you read the true scale of the temple. Stand at the bottom and imagine priests, smoke from offerings, and crowds moving along the Sacred Way behind you.

The church has another long chapter. In the fifteenth century, it was granted to the guild of Roman apothecaries — the early pharmacists of the city. Their professional college has looked after San Lorenzo in Miranda ever since. It is a quiet, almost hidden connection. The same building that honoured an emperor and empress as gods later became the home of men who mixed herbs and medicines. Few places in Rome carry such a long chain of different lives.

Take a moment to look around this part of the Forum. Very close by, early twentieth century excavations uncovered graves from an ancient burial ground, far older than the temple itself. They date from the time before Rome was a city, when small villages sat on the surrounding hills. So the ground under this temple holds even deeper layers. The emperor built here on land that already carried memory of the dead, long before marble arrived from Greece.

Step back now, toward the middle of the Sacred Way, and take in the whole building at once. The green columns, the scarred tops, the griffins, the inscription, the high door, the Baroque front. Listen to the gravel under other visitors' shoes and the birds in the pines on the Palatine Hill. As you walk on, glance back once more. You are looking at a monument to a marriage that has outlived the empire that built it.