Ancient Rome

For looming before you is the entire Roman Forum, the "caput mundi"—the center of the known world for centuries, where much of the history of the past 2,500 years happened. Here, all Rome shouted as one, "Caesar has been murdered," and crowded to hear Mark Antony's eulogy for the fallen leader. Here, legend has it that St. Paul traversed the Forum en route to his audience with Nero. Here, Roman law and powerful armies were created, keeping the barbarian world at bay for a millennium. And here the Roman emperors staged the biggest blowout extravaganzas ever mounted for the entire population of a city, outdoing even Elizabeth Taylor's Forum entry in Cleopatra.

But after a more than 27-century-long parade of pageantry you'll find that much has changed in this area, known to many locals as the Campitelli (or "Fields"). The rubble-scape of marble fragments scattered over the Forum area makes all but students of archaeology ask: Is this the grandeur that was Rome? After viewing the same, it's not surprising that Shelley and Gibbon once reflected on the sense of sic transit gloria mundi—"thus pass the glories of the world." Yet spectacular monuments—the Arch of Septimius Severus, the Palatine Hill, and the Colosseum (looming in the background), among them—remind us that this was indeed the birthplace of much of Western civilization.

Before the Christian era, before the emperors, before the powerful Republic that ruled the ancient seas, Rome was founded on seven hills, and two of them—the Capitoline and the Palatine—surround the Roman Forum, where the Romans of the later Republic and Imperial ages worshipped deities, debated politics, and wheeled and dealed. It's all history now (except on the fringes, this area has no residents besides lazy lizards and complacent cats) but this remains one of the world's most striking and significant concentrations of ancient remains—an emphatic reminder of the genius and power that made Rome the fountainhead of the Western world.