Ostia Antica

This is a day trip — but one of the best you can make from Rome.

Ostia Antica, 25km southwest of the city, was Rome's port.

For five centuries it was the place through which the grain, oil, wine, marble, and slaves that fed and built the empire passed.

It was abandoned gradually in the early medieval period, silted over, and forgotten.

What that left behind is extraordinary.

Where Pompeii shows you a single frozen moment, Ostia shows you centuries of Roman urban life layered on top of each other.

Multi-storey apartment blocks — insulae — still stand several stories high.

Thermopolia, the Roman equivalent of street food counters, have their serving holes intact.

A theatre, warehouses, bathhouses, temples, a synagogue that is one of the oldest in the western world.

Walk the Decumanus Maximus, the main street, and you understand immediately how a Roman city worked.

The Baths of Neptune have some of the finest floor mosaics in the Roman world.

The forum, the capitolium, the guild halls with their mosaic insignia — butchers, ropemakers, shipbuilders — tell you who lived and worked here and what they did.

Fun fact: on a weekday, Ostia Antica is almost deserted.

You can have entire streets to yourself.

Take the train from Roma Ostiense — 25 minutes, runs regularly.

Allow at least half a day; a full day is better.