The entire forum contains ruins from hundreds of buildings, mostly government buildings and temples. After the collapse of Rome, the few people who stayed around largely ransacked the place, stripping the magnificent buildings nearly to rubble. The area soon became abandoned and covered in the debris of future generations. You can see a church that was built on what they thought was ground level during the middle ages. After the area was excavated during the nineteenth century, the church was marooned, with a doorway several floors above the ground. They do a good job of explaining what was what, what happened in the various buildings and processional roads. The temple of the vestal virgins is a good example, with nearly all the virgins' statues (sans heads) still there, as you can see in the photo. These virgins, by the way, were the most important women in Rome, ranking just below the empress, but in return for their high status they had a pretty boring life. They entered the temple when they reached puberty, spent ten years learning the arcane rituals that they practiced alone inside the temple, then ten years performing these rituals, then another ten years teaching the rituals to the next crops of virgins, after which they retired. As the name implies, they remained virgins forever, and for those who broke this rule, they were buried alive in a tomb that is now underneath a big traffic circle in modern day Rome, which is kind of creepy.

We then moved on to the most atmospheric part of Rome, the ancient Roman forum. This huge area is a jumble of ruins from various centuries, picturesquely overgrown with trees in parts. This was the center of the world for a thousand years, where the Senate determined the fate of the world, and the all the world's goods could be bought and sold in the markets. When Rome moved from republic to empire, the forum became less important, as the emperors' palace up the hill became the center of power and the Senate just a place for old men to talk. Commerce too moved out to Trajan's newer shopping mall, leaving the forum as a huge tourist attraction even in ancient times, full of souvenir stands, fortune tellers and prostitutes (even in the ruins today there's a road market out for male prostitutes from northern Italy).

The forum sits in the valley between the Palatine Hill, where the emperors lived, and Capitoline hill, where the city's chief temple sat and where the emperor had to go frequently to attend to his ceremonial duties. We have unfortunately lost the coolest ancient site ever, unfortunately, which was a huge bridge connecting the Palatine and Capitoline hills, which shot straight over the whole Forum, enabling the emperors to walk from home to the shrine without ever having to go through the human zoo below.