Trajan's Forum

Stand at the railing and look down. The street hums behind you, scooters and buses and voices, but below your feet lies a field of pale stone, broken columns, and wild grass. The forum sits several metres beneath modern Rome. That drop matters. It marks the ground level of the ancient city, buried slowly over many centuries by flood silt, rubble, and the debris of daily life.

This was the last and largest of the Imperial Fora. These were the grand public squares that Rome's emperors built, one after another, beside the older Roman Forum. The emperor Trajan ruled in the early second century, and he wanted something bigger than any of them. He also had the money. His wars in Dacia, a kingdom roughly where Romania is today, brought enormous wealth into the city.

The forum was dedicated in the year 112. Ancient sources credit the design to Apollodorus of Damascus, Trajan's favourite architect and military engineer. Apollodorus had already built a famous bridge across the Danube for the Dacian campaigns. Here he worked on a different kind of problem. There was no empty space for a project this size. So the builders made some.

A ridge of land once connected two of Rome's hills, the Capitoline and the Quirinal. To create a flat site, workers cut back into that slope on a huge scale. Look to your right, toward the curved brick buildings rising up the hillside. That curve follows the cut. The builders turned a problem into architecture, and those brick halls are known today as Trajan's Markets.

Now find the column. You cannot miss it. It rises from the northwest end of the site, a single shaft of white marble climbing toward the sky. It was dedicated in 113, one year after the forum. Its height is about one hundred Roman feet, close to thirty metres, and taller still with its pedestal. It is built from large drums of marble stacked on top of each other — and each drum is hollow.

That is the first surprise. The column is not solid. A spiral staircase winds up inside it, lit by small slit windows cut through the marble. You can see some of those narrow openings from where you stand. Look closely at the carved band on the surface, and you will notice small dark slots set into the stone. Those are the windows, placed carefully so they would not ruin the sculpture.

And what a sculpture it is. A continuous carved frieze wraps around the column from bottom to top, like a ribbon. Unrolled, it would stretch roughly two hundred metres. It tells the story of Trajan's two wars against Dacia. Soldiers cross rivers on pontoon bridges, build camps, march, fight, and negotiate. Trajan himself appears again and again, speaking to his troops and receiving prisoners.

Here is the second surprise. Much of the frieze shows soldiers doing ordinary work. They cut timber, dig ditches, and carry supplies. Battle is only part of the story. Historians value the column because it records Roman military equipment and daily routine in such detail. It is also hard to read from the ground. The upper scenes are almost invisible to the naked eye. Some scholars think the libraries beside it once offered better views from their upper floors.

Those libraries stood on either side of the column. One held works in Latin, the other in Greek. Beyond them stretched the Basilica Ulpia, a vast roofed hall named after Trajan's family. A Roman basilica was not a church. It was a public building for law courts and business. The rows of grey granite column shafts you see standing in the excavation belong to that hall. They were raised again by modern archaeologists.

The great open square itself held a bronze equestrian statue of Trajan, a figure on horseback. The statue is long gone. But an ancient story about it survives. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote that in the fourth century, the emperor Constantius the Second visited Rome. He was amazed by this forum. He reportedly said he could never build anything like it — but perhaps he could copy the horse.

The column also became a tomb. When Trajan died, his ashes were placed in a golden urn inside its base. This was a rare honour, because Romans normally buried their dead outside the city walls. A bronze statue of Trajan once stood at the very top. It disappeared in the Middle Ages. In 1587, Pope Sixtus the Fifth placed a bronze statue of Saint Peter there instead. Look up now. That figure is Peter, not Trajan.

The area around you changed again in the twentieth century. In the 1930s, under Mussolini, the wide avenue called Via dei Fori Imperiali was cut through this district. Whole neighbourhoods were demolished to build it. The road exposed ancient remains, but it also buried large parts of the fora under asphalt. Part of Trajan's Forum still lies under the street where the traffic runs today.

Behind the column, notice the two domed churches standing close together. They are much later than the forum. They show how Rome grew in layers, each age building on the last. A Baroque dome sits beside a Roman column, and both sit above the ruins of a square that was once full of lawyers, readers, and crowds. Nothing here was simply replaced. It was built over, reused, and remembered.

Before you walk on, look once more at the drop between the street and the old pavement. Notice the height of that wall of earth and brick. That is time, made visible. Then follow the curve of the brick markets with your eyes, and end at the column. It has stood in this exact spot for more than nineteen centuries. Today, it is still the tallest thing on the square.