The Roman Forum of Rome has been immortalized by many artists and, especially in the modern era, by all the tourists who flock to the ruins. Observing better the photo of this article you can understand an important characteristic of the Roman Forum of Rome: the impressive ruins and remains that you can see today were almost completely underground. During a tour here I always underline how many things have changed here over the centuries! Let's discover what happened over the years... 

It is a simple photo but beautiful for its meanings. The painting tells the story of the Roman Forum of the past, some centuries ago, when there were no turnstiles and controls and, above all, when a large part of what was the central square of Rome was not visible. Imagine how the first archaeological excavations took place a couple of centuries ago, and before them the citizens could only see a small part of the Roman Forum! The top of the Arch of Septimius Severus, some of the columns, fragments of funeral slabs, but nothing more. Imagine that since the Middle Ages the whole area began to be buried: due to fires, earthquakes and landslides, the Roman Forum has gone to cover. To this we must also add the reality and the society of the past, when the Roman Forum was not an area to preserve and conserve, but an artistic and materialistic treasure that should be used. Noble families, popes, or ordinary citizens could not make use of what they had found, turning the archaeological finds in materials reused for other things such as churches, decorations, buildings, public or private. For all these reasons, gradually, what was the heart of the social, political and economic of Rome, where the roman citizens of the ancient times used to go to really live the active life and politics of Rome, has transformed into an area in which something emerged from the ground, some of the testimony of what it was, but nothing more.

It is not a coincidence, after all, if the whole area of the Roman Forum was also called the Campo Vaccino, and so a place devoted only to grazing sheep and cows. Think about it: from a square marble paved, magnificent monuments decorated with reliefs and statues, the columns of honor and the Curia, the Senate of Rome, to the simple shepherds who used the place to let graze their flock. After all, this is Rome, a city in constant transformation. Something changed, however, already at the beginning of the XIX century, with the domination of the French in Rome, you began to dig, in advance, to bring to light the treasure that is the historical and archeological heritage of the city. Metres and metres were excavated in the course of the time, especially with the beginning of the XX and the era of Giacomo Boni, a great and brilliant archaeologist who devoted practically his entire life to the Roman Forum and the surrounding area. Its documents, the claims and the details of the excavations that he made, the pictures taken represent a different type of treasure, a boundless archive that takes us back in time.

Today we are cataloguing it, we are trying to make public the gigantic archive of the excavations made by Giacomo Boni and his team. The first surveys carried out by Boni, who died in 1925, are still today a basis from which to understand the Roman Forum, a vast archaeological site visited by millions of people a year but that, still today, hides a lot of secrets, many doubts, many questions. This is the archaeology, after all: an attempt to bring light to where there are only shadows and often also sources of various kinds that can even remove the truth. All of this is found in the Roman Forum, a treasury for the Romans of the past, the scholars of today, and for the tourists of tomorrow...