A caption in the exhibition on the Emperor Vespasian currently in the Colosseum describes the Arch of Titus – only a few hundred yards away – as one of the best-preserved monuments from the Flavian dynasty. Yet what we have now is largely a nineteenth-century reconstruction. In 1819–22 the neoclassical architects Robert Stern and Giuseppe Valadier pulled down the private houses that had encroached on the sides of the arch and thoroughly rebuilt these sides together with the attic, using travertine instead of the original Pentelian marble. The inside of the arch includes the famous relief celebrating the taking of Jerusalem, with the Menorah looted from the Temple prominently displayed. Indeed until 1846, when the ceremony was abolished, every new pope’s inaugural procession passed through the arch, where a Jew was obliged to stand and pay homage to the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

Both facts – the evolution, as it were, of Titus’ Arch, and its use in papal pageantry – not to be found in most guidebooks, are relevant to David Watkin’s excellent, handy new book, whose main object is to see the Forum not as it looks now – “a long, clean, livid trench”, as Émile Zola wrote in 1896, in which “piles of foundations appear like bits of bone” – but through its metamorphoses over more than 2,000 years, when every age has left its mark. The Forum only ceased to be lived in, by both people and animals, in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it was turned into an open-air museum, and archaeologists imposed the view that whatever was Roman must be retrieved, and whatever they considered irrelevant, removed. Uninterested as they were in Baroque architecture, which after all shapes modern Rome much more than relics from antiquity, they ruthlessly destroyed several Baroque churches from the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries; these churches are now recorded only in Piranesi’s incomparable etchings.

Those churches that were allowed to remain – S Lorenzo in Miranda, SS Cosmas and Damian, S Giuseppe dei Falegnami, S Maria Antiqua, all built on ancient constructions – had to turn, as it were, their backs. Nowadays, their fronts on the Forum are no longer accessible, and one enters them through side or back doors, if one enters at all. They were, and still are, deprived of some of their features; this reviewer learned with dismay that the eighteenth-century Neapolitan presepe (crib), once so charmingly exhibited in SS Cosmas and Damian and a wonder to every child of his generation, had been removed to a lobby in the cloister in 1990, when Luigi Arigucci’s seventeenth-century marble floor was unaccountably dismantled.

S Lorenzo in Miranda fared better. It was raised in 1601 inside the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, which dates from the second century AD. A majestic portico of Carystian green marble, six columns wide and three deep – no less imposing than that of the Pantheon – encases a tall, elegant façade by Orazio Torriani. This stood at what was then street level, but in more recent times digging has revealed that the columns had been partially buried, and that the temple itself lay on the top of several steps. From the Forum which now lies six metres below, the church behind the pillars appears to be floating in the sky.

Professor Watkin acknowledges that excavations made such monuments as the great Arch of Septimius Severus much more visible than they had been for centuries, but he argues that in most cases only the foundations – that is, holes in the ground – were unearthed, to be exhibited to the visitor with stones of no visible meaning. Even more questionably, edifices have been reconstructed from small fragments, much in the way a dinosaur might be assembled from a single cartilage. Today’s much-admired Temple of Vesta, for instance, in truth dates from the 1930s.

A concentration of temples, altars, market, exchange, meeting halls, tribunals and parliament building, the Forum was the core of the Republican city; later, it became the Empire’s showcase, a jumble of massive erections serving the ego of the ruler of the day. This trend began with Julius Caesar’s renovations, but most of what we now have was achieved in the Imperial period: in his Ten Books on Architecture Vitruvius, who lived in the first century BC, finds almost nothing worth mentioning in the Forum. The largest and possibly the most admired construction, the Basilica of Maxentius – one of the marvels of the Western world – was accomplished around 303 AD.

More successfully than any writer before him, Watkin makes his reader aware of the multilayered, fascinating history of this unique site, which fundamentalist archaeologists had all but transformed into the ditches described by Zola. The French novelist was looking down from the Farnese Gardens, those pleasant terraces with alleys, pavilions, grottoes, built by Renaissance cardinals on the slopes of the Palatine Hill. The pope’s property for centuries, they were sold to the French Emperor in 1861, resold by him to the Italian government in 1870, ruthlessly excavated and ruined, until a sympathetic archaeologist, Giacomo Boni (who died in 1925), tried to recreate something of their shape. A faded reflection of their past splendour, they do nevertheless afford the exhausted tourist some respite.

David Watkin
THE ROMAN FORUM
280pp. Profile. £15.99.
978 1 86197 962 9

Masolino D’Amico is a writer, translator and drama critic. He is Professor of English Literature and History of the English Theatre at the Terza Università di Roma.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now