Fori Imperiali (Imperial Forums)
Built outside the Roman Forum by five rulers from Caesar to Trajan, the Imperial Forums accommodated the needs of Rome as it expanded from a republic to an empire. Later covered by Renaissance buildings, Mussolini cleared the area in 1924, exposed some of the forums, but paved over most of them when he constructed a massive avenue here for his military parades. Although these ruins are scattered on both sides of the street, a stroll along the north side of the Via dei Fori Imperiali gives you ample opportunity to see the most interesting ones, in particular those of Trajan's Forum (AD 113), near the Piazza Venezia and its two domed churches. Here you can see the ancient masterpiece Trajan's Column, its reliefs spiraling up in a narrative of the painful wars with Dacia (now Romania). The realistic scenes have been called, by scholar George Hanfmann, the Roman equivalent of a documentary war film, but you can't see them adequately without binoculars. On the north edge of this forum is the semicircular brick Trajan's Market, a three-story shopping mall ingeniously built into the Quirinal Hill. Behind it rises the massive medieval defense tower, the Torre delle Milizie.Next to Trajan's Forum is Augustus's, with its ruined Temple of Mars Ultor (2nd century BC); then there's Nerva's Forum with its gigantic Corinthian columns and Hellenistic frieze.
Address:
Via IV Novembre 94
Rome
Italy