Curated playlist
Ancient Roman buildings and structures in Rome
- Ulpian LibraryThe Bibliotheca Ulpia, known as the Ulpian Library, stood in the Forum of Trajan in ancient Rome. It is the only Roman library known to have survived until the Fall of Rome in the mid-fifth century. Every other library in the city…
- Solarium AugustiThe Solarium Augusti stands as one of ancient Rome's most ambitious acts of monumental theatre. In 10 BCE, the emperor Augustus consecrated a towering Egyptian obelisk in the Campus Martius, the broad plain between the Tiber and the hills…
- Ludus MagnusThe Ludus Magnus once had a name few people use today: the Domus Vectiliana, sometimes simply called the Great Gladiatorial Training School. Beneath the streets near the Colosseum ran a corridor barely over twenty-two feet wide. It…
- Trajan's MarketTrajan's Market stands today on the Via dei Fori Imperiali in Rome, a complex of ancient ruins that has outlasted empires, convents, and barracks. Walk through its modern entrance at Via Quattro Novembre and you step into a place once…
- Ostia AnticaOstia Antica sits 25 km southwest of Rome, where the Tiber once met the sea. Today the coastline has shifted; the ruins now lie 3 km from the water, buried for centuries under sand dunes that paradoxically became their best guardian. The…
- Altar of Domitius AhenobarbusThe Altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus sits today split between two cities, with one portion in the Louvre and another in Munich's Glyptothek. Four sculpted marble plaques, carved more than two thousand years ago, depict scenes so different in…
- Atrium LibertatisThe Atrium Libertatis, the House of Freedom, held a peculiar distinction among ancient Rome's public buildings. Its name called to mind liberty and ceremony. Its actual core function was the storage of census records, making it the formal…
- Circus MaximusThe Circus Maximus once held more than 150,000 people in a single valley between Rome's Aventine and Palatine hills. At 621 meters long and 118 meters wide, it was the largest stadium the ancient world had ever seen, and it stood at the…
- RegiaThe Regia stood at the edge of the Roman Forum, on a triangular patch of ground squeezed between three temples, and for centuries it held a secret. On the night of the 14th of March 44 BC, something strange happened inside its walls. The…
- Pantheon, RomeThe Pantheon in Rome has been standing for nearly two thousand years, and its concrete dome is still the largest of its kind anywhere on earth. That single fact invites a question most visitors never think to ask: how did a building raised…