The Basilica Ulpia
The largest basilica ever built in Rome; its re-erected columns give you the scale of the original hall.
Samanthamalgieri โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Bgabel โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท Maksym Kozlenko โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Maksym Kozlenko โ CC BY-SA 4.0
The Roman Forum is the old centre that grew over centuries; Trajan's Forum is a single fully planned project funded from one war's spoils. One is historical accretion, the other pure design.
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The last, largest and most ambitious of the imperial fora: opened in AD 112 to a design by Apollodorus of Damascus, the Syrian engineer who served as Trajan's chief architect. Building it meant cutting away an entire ridge between the Capitoline and the Quirinal โ civil engineering on a scale the city had not seen. It held a vast marble plaza, the Basilica Ulpia (the largest basilica in Rome), two libraries โ one Greek, one Latin โ with Trajan's Column between them, and a temple at the far end. The whole complex was paid for with the spoils of the Dacian wars. What survives is visible free from the Via dei Fori Imperiali railing: the re-erected basilica columns, marble paving, and the column still standing where it was raised. Descending into the excavation itself is done on the adjoining Trajan's Market ticket. Advice: walk the railing from Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum before sunset โ you pass four imperial fora in succession without a single ticket.
The largest basilica ever built in Rome; its re-erected columns give you the scale of the original hall.
The Syrian engineer who designed the forum and cut away a whole ridge to make room โ among the empire's greatest architects.
Via dei Fori Imperiali, Rome
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