Forum Boarium

Historic · Rione Ripa (Piazza della Bocca della Verità)Rome,Italy

Rome's old cattle market and river port, where two Republican temples still stand because both were turned into churches and never quarried.

The Forum Boarium was Rome's cattle market and river port, and two temples of the Republic still stand on it, on an island of grass with traffic on every side. The round one belonged to Hercules and was built around 120 BC. Its marble is Pentelic, quarried from a mountain outside Athens, which makes it the oldest surviving marble building in Rome. Its neighbour is a rectangular temple of the harbour god Portunus, a generation younger and built of local tufa and travertine under a coat of stucco. Twenty Corinthian columns still ring the round temple, and the only part it has lost is its roof. They survived because they stopped being temples. In the Middle Ages both were consecrated as churches, and a church in daily use was not stripped for building material, while everything around it was pulled apart for its stone and its metal. Across the road stands Santa Maria in Cosmedin, an eighth-century church with a brick bell tower and an inlaid marble floor. In its porch is a round stone face with an open mouth. That face is an ancient drain cover, and more people queue for it than for anything else here.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come back after dark for the temples — they are floodlit, the traffic thins, and the round one then looks like a complete building, which it does not in flat daylight.
The church behind the famous stone face is free and almost empty — nearly everyone in the queue outside leaves without going in, and the inlaid floor and the crypt are the best part of the visit.
The rectangular temple has lost its outer coating — its tufa and travertine were meant to be covered in white stucco that imitated marble, so what stands there now is the bare core.
Use the crossings and do not cut across — this is a fast multi-lane junction on three sides, and you can only reach the grass in the middle at the marked lights.

Things to do

1
Walk the ring of columns
Walk all the way around the round temple, keeping a hand's distance from the columns. Count them as you go: there are twenty, and all of them are Greek marble. Look for the one place where a column was replaced in a different, whiter stone. On the entrance side, the steps and the door frame have been worn smooth.
2
Skip the queue and go into the church
Walk past the line waiting for the stone face and go through the door beside it. Inside, the floor is covered with small cut discs and bands of marble, and the choir enclosure stands in the middle of the nave. The church is usually almost empty, with more candles burning than visitors.
3
Find the medieval house on the corner
On the edge of the square, look for a small brick building with an arched loggia and reused ancient fragments stuck into its walls. It is one of the very few houses of medieval Rome still standing, and it shows what the city looked like when the temples beside it were parish churches.