Rome's first multi-level shopping mall

Trajan's Markets and Trajan's Forum give unparalleled insight into the daily life of Ancient Rome

Trajan's Markets, the world's first multi-sotry shopping mall.
The Markets of Trajan, the world's first multi-story shopping mall.

The Emperor Trajan built his markets in the AD 2nd century, and after being closed for years they've become the first of the Imperial Fori to reopen to the public (in 1998).

You enter—when it's open; this is one of those Roman sights that has an annoying habit of closing "temporarily" for months or years at a stretch—around the back side (on Via IV Novembre), into a grand bazaar hall lined by former market stalls with marble porticos and barrel-vaulted ceilings. These now contain informative placards (in English) on each of the Imperial Fori plus some sculptural bits—most just fragments, but a few with remarkably sharp and well-preserved detailing.

You get to wander the brief but evocative sections of the most intact ancient Roman streets in the city, clamber up to the top terrace for a bird's eye panorama of the curving market and forums of Trajan and Caesar across the street, and explore the four stories of 150 empty tabernae (shops) that made up the world’s first multilevel shopping mall.

When it's open, you can also duck through a tunnel that leads under Via de Fori Imperiali to Trajan's Forum (if the tunnel's closed, you can still see it pretty well from the road).

This site is marked by several rows of reerected columns that comprised merely the central part of the huge Basilica Ulpia, Rome's largest basilican law courts.

Behind them rises the Imperial Fori's most stunning sight, the 98-foot Trajan's Column, today topped by a 16th-century statue of St. Peter. Around the column wraps a cartoon strip of deep relief carvings that would measure some 660 feet if stretched out. It uses a cast of 2,500 to tell the story of Trajan's victorious AD 101–106 campaigns to subdue the Dacians (modern-day Romania).

A spiral staircase inside leads to the top (closed), and the emperor's ashes were kept in a golden urn entombed at the base. It’s hard to see the carvings well (casts are kept at the Museo della Civiltà Romana in EUR), but you can get a better glimpse of some of them from the street level.

(I hate to brag, but when I was a kid and they were cleaning and restoring the column, I was lucky enough to get to walk the scaffolding all the way to the top, mere inches from the ancient comic strip detailing the empeoror's battles and vistories; it was awesome.)

Via IV Novembre 94 (at the end of Via Nazionale)
tel. +39-06-679-0048, www.capitolium.org