Basilica Iulia, Rome

These broad foundations and scattered uprights are the Basilica Iulia, a civic basilica that once lined the Roman Forum. Julius Caesar began it in forty-six before Christ, and Augustus completed it, dedicating the finished building to Gaius and Lucius Caesar in twelve after Christ. This was not a church: it held the centumviri, a court whose cases chiefly concerned inheritances, alongside shops, banking, and public business.

Imagine the lost interior as a vast roofed public hall. Its main space measured eighty-two by eighteen metres, while galleries rose above the surrounding aisles. Temporary screens could split the hall so several courts heard cases at once; for major hearings, they came down and the whole building became a single judicial arena.

Notice the worn paving and the steps facing the Forum. Ancient visitors scratched game boards into the marble here, including grids for games resembling chess, draughts, and noughts-and-crosses. Fire repeatedly transformed this place: after the blaze of two hundred and eighty-three after Christ, Diocletian rebuilt it.

Much later, people stripped its marble for lime, and part of the ruin became the church of Santa Maria in Cannapara. What remains lets you read an immense civic building through its surviving ground plan.