Towering in dazzling white marble at the foot of the Capitoline Hill in Rome, the Vittoriano, known officially as the Altare della Patria or Altar of the Fatherland, dominates the open space of Piazza Venezia. The monument was begun in 1885 and inaugurated in 1911 to mark the first king of a united Italy, Victor Emmanuel II, and the unification of the country fifty years earlier. Designed by Giuseppe Sacconi after a competition won in the early 1880s, the building was meant to symbolise the new.....

Built to shelter one of the great masterpieces of Roman sculpture, the Ara Pacis Museum stands on the bank of the Tiber in central Rome, housing the reassembled altar of the Augustan peace within a sleek modern building of white travertine, glass and steel. The museum was designed by the American architect Richard Meier and opened in 2006, the first significant new public building in the historic centre of Rome in decades. The altar itself, commissioned by the Roman Senate in 13 BC and dedicate.....

Standing between the Colosseum and the Forum, the Arch of Constantine is the largest surviving triumphal arch in Rome and one of the finest in the Roman world. Erected by the Senate in 315 AD to mark the tenth anniversary of Constantine accession and his victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge three years earlier, the arch is more than twenty metres high and almost twenty-six metres wide. The triple-arched form, with a large central bay flanked by two smaller ones, was a Roman standard, bu.....

Set on the highest point of the Sacred Way as it climbs out of the Roman Forum toward the Palatine Hill, the Arch of Titus is the oldest surviving honorific arch in Rome. Erected in 81 AD by the emperor Domitian to commemorate his recently deceased older brother Titus and the suppression of the Jewish revolt in 70 AD, the arch is single-bayed and decorated with some of the finest sculptural reliefs to survive from the early empire. The two great panels on the inner walls of the arch are the mos.....

Sunk several metres below the level of the modern street in central Rome, the archaeological area of Largo Argentina is a square of four Republican-era temples and the partial remains of the Curia of Pompey, the meeting hall where Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BC. The site was uncovered during demolitions in the 1920s and has been open to limited public view ever since. The four temples, labelled by archaeologists with the letters A, B, C and D since their precise de.....

Begun in 271 AD by the emperor Aurelian and completed under his successor Probus, the Aurelian Walls remain the most intact ancient city wall in Europe, encircling the historic centre of Rome for around nineteen kilometres. The defences were built in haste against the threat of Germanic invasions, the first time in centuries that the capital had felt the need to fortify itself. Constructed largely of brick-faced concrete, the walls stood originally about eight metres high and incorporated exist.....

Built in the early seventeenth century for the Barberini family of Pope Urban VIII, the Palazzo Barberini is one of the great baroque palaces of Rome and now houses the Galleria Nazionale d Arte Antica, the national collection of paintings from the medieval period to the late eighteenth century. The building stands on the Quirinal Hill on the busy Via delle Quattro Fontane. The palace was designed by Carlo Maderno and completed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini, the three leading .....

Although Saint Peter at the Vatican is more famous, the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano is officially the cathedral of Rome and the mother church of all Catholic churches, the seat of the Bishop of Rome in his role as Pope. Founded in the early fourth century by the emperor Constantine, it stands on the site of an ancient palace given to the church by his predecessors. The basilica was the principal church of the city for almost a thousand years before the papacy moved its main residence t.....

Built in the fifth century to house the chains believed to have bound Saint Peter during his imprisonment in Jerusalem, the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli stands on the slope of the Esquiline Hill in central Rome. The chains are still kept beneath the main altar, where they are venerated on the saint feast day, but most visitors come for an entirely different reason: Michelangelo Moses. The original basilica was funded by the empress Eudoxia in 432-440 AD to house the relic and has been rebu.....

Often overlooked because of its modest exterior and unprepossessing entrance, the Basilica of Santa Prassede on the Esquiline Hill in Rome contains one of the most extraordinary cycles of Byzantine-style mosaics in the city. Built in its present form in the early ninth century by Pope Paschal I, it survives largely as he left it. Paschal commissioned the basilica around 822 AD as a replacement for an earlier church on the site, dedicating it to Saint Praxedes, an early Roman martyr believed to .....