Page 439 - (DK Eyewitness) Travel Guide - Italy

ROME : A VENTINE AND LA TER AN  437

1 Temples of the
Forum Boarium
Piazza della Bocca della Verità. Map 6
E1. @ 23, 44, 81, 160, 170, 280, 628,
715, 716. Open 1st & 3rd Sun of month
for guided tours only (06 3996 7700).
These wonderfully well-
Locator Map preserved Republican-era
Santa Maria della Consolazione See Rome Street Finder map 6 temples are at their best in
was named after an image of the moonlight, standing in their
Virgin placed here in 1385 to give grassy enclave beside the Tiber
consolation to the sheltered by umbrella pines.
condemned. During the day, they look
less romantic, stranded in a
sea of traffic. They date
from the 2nd century BC,
and were saved from ruin
by being consecrated as
Christian churches in the
Middle Ages by the Greek
community then living in
the area. The rectangular
San Teodoro is a temple, formerly known as
circular church on the the Temple of Fortuna Virilis,
edge of the Palatine with was probably dedicated to
exceptional 6th-century Portunus, the god of rivers and
V I A D E I F I E N I L I
apse mosaics. ports. Set on a podium it has
four Ionic travertine columns
San Giorgio in Velabro, fluted at the front and 12 half-
a 7th-century basilica, was columns embedded in the tufa
O damaged in an explosion in wall of the cella – the room that
R 1994, and has now been restored.
O housed the image of the god. In
D the 9th century the Temple was
O Arco degli Argentari converted into the church of
E
T Santa Maria Egiziaca, after

N a 5th-century prostitute who
A re formed and became a hermit.
S
The smaller circular Temple,
I
D made of solid marble and sur-

A roun ded by 20 fluted columns,
I was dedicated to Hercules but
V
was long thought to be a Temple
of Vesta because of its similarity
to the one in the Forum.
V I A D E I C E R C H I

The 4th-century Arch of Janus,
a four-faced marble-plated
arch at the edge of the
Forum Boarium market, was
V I A D E L L A G R E C A
an ideal place for merchants
and customers to do
business in the shade. The Ionic façade of the Republican-era
Temple of Portunus

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