You're looking down into the Roman Forum. Broken columns, arches, temple platforms, the whole spread of it sitting in a pit below street level. This was the center of the known world. Elections, trials, triumphs, riots, the Senate — it all happened right here.
And for about a thousand years, people grazed cows on it.
After the empire fell, the Forum did not become a solemn ruin. It filled up with silt and rubble and mud, foot by foot, until the ancient ground was buried under thirty feet of dirt. Grass grew over the top. Romans forgot what was underneath and renamed the whole area the Campo Vaccino — the cow field. For centuries, the most important square in human history was pastureland. Herders drove cattle across the buried Senate. The columns you see poking up? Back then, only the very tops were visible, sticking out of the meadow like weird stone stumps.
Under all that dirt sat the machinery of a republic. The speaker's platform here was called the Rostra, and it got that name
from the bronze rams — the beaks, or rostra — that Rome ripped off enemy warships and bolted to the front of it as trophies. Politicians gave their speeches standing on other people's shattered navies. It's why, to this day, a speaker's podium is called a rostrum. And somewhere near here stood the Golden Milestone, a gilded marker from which every road in the empire was measured. That's the litera
