Trajan's Markets and the Museum of the Imperial Forums

Historic · Rione Monti (Via Quattro Novembre 94)Rome,Italy

A curved six-level Roman brick building cut into a Rome hillside, the one ancient building here you climb through and come out on top of.

Trajan's Markets are a curved brick building six levels high, cut into the flank of the Quirinal hill around 110 AD. They are the one ancient building in central Rome you enter, climb, and come out on top of. Rooms open off passages and stairways on every floor, and the hall at the upper level still carries its original concrete cross-vaults. The name is a modern guess. Archaeologists now read the complex as offices for running the forum below at least as much as shops, and nothing has been found that settles it either way. The building was part of a competition between emperors. Each one answered his predecessor by adding a new forum beside the last, and Trajan's forum, paid for out of his war in Dacia, was the final and largest of them. Nineteen centuries later the row was broken: in 1932 a road was driven straight across the imperial forums, and the dense quarter that had grown over them was demolished to make way. From the terrace on top you look down on both at once, the ancient plan and the modern road that runs across it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

This is the ancient site with no queue — it belongs to the city rather than the state, so the big combined tickets do not include it and the coach groups never arrive.
Save the roof terrace for late afternoon — it looks straight down the length of the imperial forums, and the low sun picks out the column drums and the foundations in the excavation.
Expect stairs between most of the six levels — there is a lift, but it does not reach everywhere, so the full route through the building is not step-free.
Look at the thresholds in the doorways — the travertine slabs still carry the sockets and the wear marks of doors that were opened and shut every day for centuries.

Things to do

1
Climb the building floor by floor
Start at the entrance level and keep taking the stairs upward, cutting through vaulted rooms and out onto open galleries. You pass through the same doorways and along the same passages that were used when the place was working. Very few ancient buildings anywhere let you move through them vertically like this.
2
Come out onto the terrace over the forums
The route ends on a flat roof above the excavations. Below you, four imperial forums lie side by side, cut across by a modern road with traffic on it. Pick out Trajan's column first, then follow the line of the ancient paving until it disappears under the tarmac.
3
Find the forum fragments set back in place
The museum uses the ancient rooms as its galleries, so carved cornices, capitals and inscription blocks stand inside the halls they came from rather than in glass cases. Get close to one of the marble friezes: the drill work in the leaves is deep enough to put a finger into.