From the pavement of Via dei Fori Imperiali, Trajan’s Forum looks like an enormous excavated floor: low walls, broken columns, the Quirinal rising behind it. It is hard to picture it as Romans did, a square enclosed by porticoes, statues and cornices as high as buildings.
The pieces that let us reconstruct it did not remain in the excavation. They were brought up here, into the vast brick building that wraps around the side of the hill: Trajan’s Markets, home to the Museum of the Imperial Fora. In these rooms, the fragments do not sit in cases one by one. They become columns, architectural orders and life-size reliefs again.
The name, however, is misleading. These were not markets in the sense we mean today, but a complex tied to the working life of the Fora. That is what makes the visit so absorbing: you do not simply learn to recognise works of art, you learn to see the ruins you have just crossed all over again.
How do you put a building back on its feet when only its fallen pieces survive?
Let’s begin!
1. The relief with the bull-slaying cupids
The first piece you come to formed part of the exterior decoration of the Temple of Venus Genetrix, the temple Caesar dedicated in his forum to the goddess his family claimed descent from.
The museum’s catalogue registers it as a reconstructed figured relief with cupids in the act of sacrificing bulls, arranged in a diverging pattern: each pair turns its back to the other. Bull-slaying cupids are winged putti killing a bull, a motif that recurs often in ancient art and that here ran along the side of the building.
What does “reconstructed” mean on a museum label?
The surviving fragments have been remounted in their original position, with the gaps left visible rather than filled in. It is the method behind almost this entire museum, and it is also why it should be looked at from a distance before being looked at up close: up close you see the fractures, a few steps back you see the frieze.
2. The bracket cornice from the Temple of Mars Ultor
The second piece closed off the top of the outer wall of the Temple of Mars Ultor, in the Forum of Augustus, and is a reconstructed bracket cornice.
A bracket cornice is the element that closes off the top of a wall, projecting outward and resting on a row of protruding blocks. It serves two purposes at once: throwing rainwater clear of the wall, and creating, underneath, a continuous band of shadow that draws the building’s silhouette against the sky.
Standing in front of this piece, what matters is the scale. These are blocks that ran along the top of the wall, where no one would ever have seen them up close: look at them at eye level and you realise how carefully worked even the parts that, from the street, were only a dark line really were.
3. The clipeus with the head of Jupiter
From the Forum of Augustus comes a clipeus fragment with a head of Jupiter: a clipeus is a carved round shield.
On the attic of the porticoes of that forum, clipei with heads of Jupiter Ammon alternated with caryatids (female figures standing in for columns). This was not decoration for its own sake: that forum was a political programme built in images, and the row of clipei and caryatids ran above the niches that held statues of the great figures of Roman history.
Look at it thinking of it not as a single piece but as a series. Imperial Rome worked by repetition: the same motif, dozens of times, all along the portico, until it became a rhythm rather than a figure.
4. The reconstructed order of the porticoes of the Forum of Augustus
The fourth piece is what sets this museum apart from every other archaeological storeroom in the city, and it is also the answer to the question I opened with.
The reconstruction of the order of the porticoes of the Forum of Augustus rebuilds, at full scale, a section of the front of those porticoes, and it is displayed in the Great Hall, the museum’s most important room. The original fragments in Luna marble are mounted together with resin casts and limestone integrations, and the materials are visually distinguishable.
The caryatids that support the attic, incidentally, are not a Roman invention: they echo those of the Erechtheion, on the Acropolis of Athens. Augustus was quoting classical Greece inside his own forum, and quoting it word for word.
It is a deliberate curatorial choice, and understanding it changes what you see. Each fragment could have been displayed in its own case, with its own label, leaving you to imagine the whole: it would have been more rigorous and completely useless, because architecture can only be understood in elevation. Placing the cast next to the real piece accepts a compromise, and in return gives back what the Fora have lost more than anything else: height.
After this room, go back and look at the Fora excavations from the street: now you know what is missing above those walls.
5. Statues in cuirass and toga
Also from the Forum of Augustus come standing male and female statues, some in cuirass and others in the toga.
The two garments are not a wardrobe detail, they are two roles. The cuirass, with its torso modelled in muscle and its leather flaps, speaks of military command; the toga, with its heavy drapery and its gathered arm, speaks of civil office. A Roman walking past those statues read the difference at the speed we read a uniform today.
This is what remains of a display that followed a rule. In the niches of the porticoes and exedrae stood the summi viri, the great men of Roman history, each with an inscribed slab beneath summarising his career; in the central niche of one exedra was Aeneas fleeing Troy with his father on his shoulders, in the opposite one Romulus. Augustus placed himself at the end of that line.
6. Fragments with sandals and drapery
Next to the whole statues are displayed fragments with sandals and drapery, and among them is the mulleus, the high red shoe that in Rome originally belonged only to patricians, and later to senators and curule magistrates.
Fragments of this kind seem like the least interesting part of an archaeological museum, and are in fact the ones scholars use the most, because a shod foot tells the rank of the person wearing it even when the statue has lost its head, its arms and its name. The detail ancient vandalism did not bother to remove is the one that today tells us the rank.
7. The amphora collection, in a seventeenth-century cistern
The seventh work is Roman, but the setting that holds it is not: that is the surprise of the visit.
At entrance level, the amphora collection is displayed inside a seventeenth-century cistern, a space fifteen centuries younger than the objects it holds. It is also one of the newest displays in the museum.
Amphorae were the containers of the ancient Mediterranean: they carried wine, oil and fish sauce, were thrown away or reused on arrival, and their shape tells where they came from. Putting them in a cistern, itself a container for liquids, is a curator’s joke, and it works.
And what about the building that holds all of this?
The building, the largest work of all
The museum occupies a brick complex built into the flank of the Quirinal, and you should look at the building the way you would look at an artefact.
The Great Hall is the main space: two overlapping levels of rooms facing onto a central nave, with doorways framed in travertine, relieving arches in brick above the lintels, and the great cross-vaults in rough concrete, left bare, covering the whole hall. A walkway runs at half height and lets you look down over the nave: from up there you understand best how the whole thing stands up.
From outside, on the side facing the Forum, the complex presents itself as a hemicycle on two tiers of arches and windows, following the curve of the exedra of Trajan’s Forum. Above, detached and higher than everything else, stands the Torre delle Milizie, the crenellated medieval tower that you have in frame too, if you have photographed this view, almost certainly without knowing what it was.
One last thing to tell you about the name, because the museum is not called after the building. “Trajan’s Markets” is a modern label and did not exist in antiquity. It arose from the idea that the complex was ancient Rome’s shopping centre, and more recent studies contradict this: the internal streets were not passable by carts, and the prevailing function appears to have been administrative, offices and archives linked to the Imperial Fora, with trade reduced to a minor part. The museum is in fact called the Museum of the Imperial Fora, not the museum of the markets.
Practical information
Details verified on 13 September 2026 on the official website of Trajan’s Markets. Before you travel, check again on mercatiditraiano.it, because prices and hours change and those below carry today’s date.
Warning: this museum is not part of the National Roman Museum’s combined ticket. It is a municipal museum, run by Roma Capitale within the Musei in Comune system, and has its own ticket. Anyone showing up at the desk with the state combined ticket has to buy a different one.
Tickets. Full price for non-residents is 19.50 euros and covers the archaeological route and the museum; the reduced price for non-residents is 14.00 euros. Advance booking, online or at the ticket office for later dates and by card only, adds 1 euro. From February 2026 admission is free for residents of Rome and the Metropolitan City, who must show ID: this is a residency condition, so the figure that matters for visitors from elsewhere remains 19.50 euros.
Opening hours. The museum is open every day, 9:30-19:30, with last entry at 18:30. It has no weekly closing day: it only stays closed on 1 May and 25 December, and observes reduced hours on 24 and 31 December.
Getting there. Metro line B stops at Colosseo, from where you walk up Via dei Fori Imperiali in ten minutes; buses stop at Piazza Venezia. The entrance is at Via IV Novembre 94, on the upper side of the complex and not the side facing the Fora: turning up on the Fora side is the mistake almost everyone makes.
How much time to allow. The seven works in this article and the Great Hall take an hour and a half. Allow two hours if you also walk the upper levels, from which you look down over the Fora.
Temporary exhibitions. The current programme is updated every month in the Rome exhibitions table. This article covers the permanent route.
What to see nearby
You are at the exact point where ancient Rome and today’s Rome overlap, and there are three things to pair with it.
The first is the view over the Fora from the street, which you can now read: after seeing the reconstructed portico order, you know what is missing above those low walls. The second is the Roman Forum and Palatine, which begins two hundred metres away and tells the earlier phase. The third is the Colosseum, at the end of the street.
Fifty metres away, in Piazza Venezia, stands the Vittoriano, which can be climbed and offers the best high viewpoint over all of this.
If instead you want to know where the statues that once filled these fora ended up, the answer lies largely at Palazzo Massimo and at Castel Sant’Angelo: the first is the state’s collection, the second is the mausoleum that closes, downstream, the same imperial story.
Photo credits: hemicycle of Trajan’s Markets by Alexkom000 (CC BY 4.0); Great Hall by Amphipolis (CC BY-SA 2.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
