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A Web transcription of The Roman Forum — Its History and Its Monuments by Christian Hülsen published by Ermanno Loescher & Co Publishers to H. M. the Queen of Italy 1906 Text, maps, and black-and‑white images are in the public domain. Color photos are © William P. Thayer.

A Virtual Tour of the Forum, by an Expert

The Roman Forum: the most crowded deserted place in the world.

Filippo Coarelli, prefacing a 1982 republication of Hülsen's book, wrote: "To republish, nearly eighty years after its first appearance, a book on the Roman Forum might seem to be a useless or even outright wrongheaded enterprise. So long a time non dovrebbe essere trascorso senza portare sostanziali progressi perfino in un campo di studi come la topografia di Roma antica, che certo non rappresenta il settore di punta nell' ambito delle scienze dell' antichità. Che non sia questo il caso invece chiunque dovrà convenire a lettura ultimata del presente libretto. This is basically due to two reasons: the end of the major excavations in the Forum after the early 1900's and the corresponding decline in studies of Roman topography in the decades between the two world wars. The historical and archaeological interpretation of the Roman Forum thus remains today substantially what it was at the beginning of the century. . . ."

For my part, since I am neither an archaeologist nor an expert in Roman antiquity, I would merely add that the gentle reader, desirous of retracing onsite our author's footsteps, will be unable to do so: under the pressure of today's millions of visitors, the authorities have barred access to very many areas of the Forum, to the point that the bulk of it has now become inaccessible to us mere layfolk: we find ourselves channelled along the Sacra Via with sad, ugly metal barriers on either side of us. (They call this "returning the Via Sacra to the people", but looking at that claim would take us too far for our present purposes.)

Thus the virtual tour proposed here, conducted by a guide who was intimately involved in the excavations of the Forum, is better, in some respects, than the actual visit of the site: for example, Hülsen's maps and reconstructions, often very beautiful — there are about forty of them — provide a better understanding of the main monuments better than any unaccompanied walk. (It's true that the 1906 photos are not up to the level we're used to in the twenty-first century: I'll be keeping them, but have also added some of my own here and there.)

Here then is Hülsen's text:

Table of Contents