The Sovrintendenza Capitolina concluded an important excavation campaign just before Christmas in the area of Largo Corrado Ricci. This is the site where a very small part (the northeast portion) of the Templum Pacis, the Forum of Peace or Forum of Vespasian commissioned by Vespasian, emperor from 69 to 79 AD, once stood, following his victories in the Jewish-Roman War. It was the third in the sequence of Imperial Fora.
WATCH THE VIDEO OF THE EXCAVATIONS AT THE FORUM OF PEACE (subtitles in English):
This area is distinct from the other Forums, alternating between buildings and open spaces without paving. Similar to the others, it has witnessed the layering of many “Romes,” or rather a kind of Rome without interruption: much loved by view painters, with the famous bakery of Colonnacce (on the side of the Forum of Nerva), demolished by the fascist regime in the 1930s, a common fate for the Imperial Forums sacrificed to the then “Via dell’Impero.” The remains of the demolished Palazzo Nicolini, which had in turn done the same with the previous structures. In the seventeenth century, the area was a lively zone of residential and commercial buildings, and even earlier, it had become a large medieval urban fortress, that of the Conti family, under the shadow of a tower erected by Pope Innocent III (1198-1216).
The discovery of cellars and large kilns, which can be easily imagined to have been the fate of many imperial marbles transformed into lime, reveals to archaeologists the evidence of the great complexity of the area, which had not been subject to archaeological investigations until now. Moreover, with the upcoming excavations, thanks also to the funds from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), it will probably be possible to reach the imperial phases and, why not, even the earlier ones. The hope is that this relatively small section of the Imperial Forums, not adequately investigated with the currently used methodologies, may bring some new interesting data to the understanding of an area that is only seemingly well-known: written sources, views, nineteenth-century photographs, and old-style digs (not scientific excavations) from the first half of the twentieth century do not represent a sufficient heritage to understand the phases in a city that has been constantly transforming for millennia like Rome.
Revealing Pompeii’s Prison-Bakery: Insights into Ancient Exploitation