The Theatre of Marcellus rises above the street with a striking facade of stacked stone arches, their tiers framed by classic columns that once inspired the design of the Colosseum. This massive structure, originally seating over eleven…
Tiber Island and Forum Boarium
This walk traces the oldest foundations of Rome along the Tiber, where mystical legends, ancient marble temples, and a ship-shaped island reveal the city's water-bound origins.
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1. Theatre of Marcellus
2. San Nicola in Carcere
San Nicola in Carcere is distinguished by the rows of ancient stone columns embedded directly into its exterior walls and facade. This church, whose name translates to Saint Nicholas in Prison, sits on the site of the Forum Holitorium, an…
3. Ponte Fabricio
Ponte Fabricio is the oldest Roman bridge in the city still standing in its original form, a stone structure built in sixty-two BC to replace an earlier wooden crossing. You can identify it by the two marble pillars topped with four-faced…
4. Tiber Island
Tiber Island is a narrow, boat-shaped stretch of land resting in the middle of the river Tiber. Its travertine embankments, which date to the first century before Christ, were constructed to mimic the prow and stern of a Roman ship.
5. Pons Aemilius
A single, solitary arch stands in the middle of the Tiber, a detached fragment of masonry that defies the river’s flow. This is all that remains of the Pons Aemilius, the oldest Roman stone bridge in the city. Originally begun as a wooden…
6. Temple of Portunus
The Temple of Portunus rises on a high stone podium, defined by its tall, graceful Ionic columns and its rectangular shape. This building stands in the Forum Boarium, the site of Rome’s ancient cattle market and its primary river port…
7. Temple of Hercules Victor
The Temple of Hercules Victor is unmistakable for its circular colonnade of twenty slender Corinthian columns. Built around one hundred and twenty before the common era in the ancient cattle market known as the Forum Boarium, it is the…
8. Mouth of Truth
The Mouth of Truth is a heavy, circular marble mask carved into the likeness of a bearded man with wide, hollow eyes and a gaping mouth. Weighing more than one thousand three hundred kilograms and measuring nearly one point eight metres…
9. Arch of Janus
The Arch of Janus is a massive, four-sided structure of marble and brick that rises as the only surviving quadrifrons, or four-fronted arch, in Rome. It stands sixteen metres high and twelve metres wide, featuring four open passageways…