ancient cities

Further Readings
Dameron, George W. 2004. Florence and Its Church in
the Age of Dante. State College: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Fei, Silvano, Grazia Gobbi Sica, and Paolo Sica. 1995.
Firenze: Profilo di Storia Urbana. Firenze: Alinea
Editrice.
Girouard, Mark. 1985. Cities and People: A Social and
Architectural History. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Goy, Richard. 2002. Florence: The City and Its
Architecture. London: Phaidon.
Mayernik, David. 2003. Timeless Cities: An Architect’s
Reflections on Renaissance Italy. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Norman, Diana. 1995. Siena, Florence, and Padua: Art,
Society, and Religious Life 1280–1400. Vol. 1,
Interpretative Essays. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Turner, Richard N. 1997. Renaissance Florence: The
Invention of a New Art. New York: Prentice Hall.
Wirtz, Rolfe C. 2000. Florence: Art and Architecture.
Cologne, Germany: Konemann.
Fo r u m
In a Roman city, the forum was a large, rectangular,
centrally located, open space, usually surrounded
by monumental public structures. These
buildings typically included many of the principal
political, religious, and commercial centers of the
city. The forum was often the site of local markets,
although as towns grew, this function was
sometimes transferred to secondary fora, as at
Rome. The forum was also the setting for a variety
of spectacular urban rituals, such as aristocratic
funerals, court trials, religious ceremonies,
public assemblies, and popular entertainments.
Due to the concentration of these essential structures
and functions in and around the forum, to
the Romans, this space was imbued with potent
symbolic meaning as the core of the city and the
repository of its most Roman qualities.
The main forum at Rome (the Forum Romanum),
which subsequently became the model for all later
fora in other Roman cities, was originally a seasonally
swampy depression located at the foot of
the Capitoline and Palatine Hills and close to a key
ford of the Tiber River. Despite its marshy nature,
Forum
279
this space was a natural crossroads, and the first
major construction project in the history of the city
of Rome was the digging of a drainage ditch from
the Forum to the Tiber, accompanied by the
dumping of many thousands of cubic meters of fill
in the Forum to raise the ground level and render
the area dry and habitable year-round. These
transformations, which were accomplished by the
kings of Rome during the seventh and sixth centuries
BC, paved the way for the rapid development
of the Forum in the centuries that followed.
By the middle of the Roman Republic (509–31
BC), the key structures that would define the space
of the Forum were in place. Among these were the
Temple of Vesta (where the sacred flame of the city
was kept), the Curia (the usual meeting place of
the Roman senate), the rostra (speakers’ platform),
and the temples of Castor, Saturn, and Concord.
The Forum at this point was a rectangular open
space roughly 150 meters long and 75 meters
wide, with its long axis stretching out in a southeasterly
direction from the slopes of the Capitoline
Hill. The two long sides of the Forum were originally
lined by shops and businesses, especially
those involving financial transactions, but these
were displaced over time by two enormous multistory
colonnades, the Basilica Aemilia along the
north side and the Basilica Julia along the south.
The open space of the Forum was the setting for
many of the most dramatic public events of Roman
history, including Cicero’s fiery orations and Mark
Antony’s funeral speech for Julius Caesar, which
ended in violent rioting and the impromptu cremation
of Caesar’s body in the Forum itself. Prior to
the construction of the Flavian Amphitheater
(Colosseum) in the first century AD, many public
entertainments such as wild beast hunts and gladiator
games were held in the Forum.
During the empire (31 BC–AD 476), the Forum
became progressively more crowded with shrines,
statues, and other monuments. The emperors also
constructed a series of new, huge, lavishly decorated
imperial fora to the north of the old Forum,
which assumed many of the day-to-day juridical
and political functions of the original Forum. Even
as its official roles declined, however, through out
the Roman period, the Forum Romanum retained
its symbolic identity as the heart of both the
city and the empire. It was imitated in all other
Roman towns, so that throughout the empire,
the urban life of all Roman cities focused around