Roman Forum

For about five hundred years, this was the centre of the Western world. Every road really did lead here. The golden milestone — the Milliarium Aureum — stood near the Temple of Saturn, and every distance in the Roman Empire was measured from that single point. When someone in Roman Britain asked how far it was to Rome, they meant how far to this exact spot.

What you see now is a jumble of columns, arches, and brick walls that can feel confusing, but imagine it at its peak: a dense urban canyon of marble temples, government buildings, law courts, and shops, all painted in vivid colours. Romans loved colour. Those white marble ruins were originally painted red, blue, gold, and green. The austere white classical aesthetic we associate with ancient Rome is basically a misunderstanding — the paint just wore off, and Renaissance artists assumed it was always bare stone.

Julius Caesar was cremated here. You can still see the spot — the Temple of Divus Julius, where a small altar now sits. After his assassination on the Ides of March in 44 BC, Mark Antony gave his famous funeral speech right here, and the crowd became so enraged they built a spontaneous pyre from whatever they could grab — furniture, wooden stalls, even their own clothes — and burned his body on the spot. The temple was later built over the cremation site.

For centuries after Rome fell, this place was literally buried. Medieval Romans called it the Campo Vaccino — the cow field — because cattle grazed on the soil that had accumulated over the ruins. It was not properly excavated until the nineteenth century. Eighteen hundred years of human history was just sitting under a pasture.