The journey continues…
TOURISM HAS BEEN MY PASSION AND MY PROFESSION SINCE 1990. I BEGAN IN LA PLATA, ARGENTINA, AT EUROMAR TURISMO, THE AGENCY OWNED BY MY BELOVED FATHER, ORAZIO FILIPPO GRECO, BEFORE CONTINUING IN ITALY WITH ANDINA VIAGGI. MERLINTRAVEL GROWS FROM THAT EXPERIENCE AND THE DESIRE TO KEEP EXPLORING AND SHARING THE WORLD. THE JOURNEY CONTINUES…
LET’S SEE WHERE IT TAKES US.
The journey continues…
TOURISM HAS BEEN MY PASSION AND MY PROFESSION SINCE 1990. I BEGAN IN LA PLATA, ARGENTINA, AT EUROMAR TURISMO, THE AGENCY OWNED BY MY BELOVED FATHER, ORAZIO FILIPPO GRECO, BEFORE CONTINUING IN ITALY WITH ANDINA VIAGGI. MERLINTRAVEL GROWS FROM THAT EXPERIENCE AND THE DESIRE TO KEEP EXPLORING AND SHARING THE WORLD. THE JOURNEY CONTINUES…
LET’S SEE WHERE IT TAKES US.
Rome Guide 12 · Augustan monuments, Jewish continuity and an island of healing
A close historical route from the layered shell of the Theatre of Marcellus and the Portico of Octavia through Rome’s Jewish quarter, then across the ancient Pons Fabricius to the Tiber Island’s long landscape of healing and memory.
Plan the routeWhy this district matters
The Theatre of Marcellus, temples of Apollo and Bellona, and Portico of Octavia belonged to distinct complexes around the southern Campus Martius. Their present proximity is ancient, but their isolated appearance is largely modern. Medieval housing, fortification and worship occupied the monuments for centuries; the theatre still carries Peruzzi’s Renaissance palace. Archaeological clearance between the 1920s and 1930s exposed Roman forms by demolishing later urban fabric, so the open lawns and separated ruins are not an untouched classical landscape.
Rome’s Jewish community predates the papal ghetto by many centuries. Paul IV’s enclosure of 1555 forced Jews into a low, flood-prone district and imposed restrictions on residence, work and public life. Emancipation came with the end of papal rule in 1870, but it was followed by demolition and rebuilding that erased much of the enclosed quarter. The monumental Great Synagogue of 1904, the museum collections from the lost Cinque Scole and the surviving lanes must therefore be read together rather than as one preserved ghetto streetscape.
The district also carries the violence of fascist racial laws and Nazi occupation. The raid of 16 October 1943 reached beyond the former ghetto across Rome; more than a thousand Jewish residents were arrested and deported toward Auschwitz-Birkenau. Memorial stones and Largo 16 Ottobre return individual names to ordinary streets. Across Pons Fabricius, the Tiber Island adds another continuity: an ancient sanctuary of Aesculapius, medieval church, early-modern hospital and modern care institutions keep healing attached to the island without making every later building a direct survival of the Roman temple.
Read what remains and what was removed: monument, enclosure, emancipation, persecution and living community occupy the same short walk but must never be collapsed into one romantic image.
The route
Begin on Via del Teatro di Marcello and circle the ancient cavea before entering the archaeological corridor toward the temples and Portico of Octavia. Move slowly through Via della Reginella, Piazza Mattei and the synagogue complex, reserving deliberate time at Largo 16 Ottobre. Cross Pons Fabricius only after the Jewish-quarter chapters, then use the island’s spine to connect ancient medicine, modern hospital life, San Bartolomeo and Pons Cestius.
Separate Marcellus’s Roman arcades from the palace above, then compare Apollo’s reconstructed columns with Bellona’s less legible remains.
Follow the Portico of Octavia from imperial complex to fish market and church before reading the ghetto’s surviving and demolished fabric.
Pair Piazza Mattei with the Great Synagogue and museum, then stop at the public memorials of 16 October 1943.
Cross the two-arched Pons Fabricius, trace the island’s ship form and care institutions, and leave by the largely rebuilt Pons Cestius.
Ten chapters
The order moves from the cleared Roman monuments through the rebuilt Jewish quarter and its places of memory, then across two historically different bridges. Use the index to revisit one chapter without collapsing those histories.
A Roman theatre became fortress, palace and isolated archaeological monument without ceasing to be architecture
Augustan arcades support Peruzzi’s sixteenth-century palace, making reuse—not resemblance to the Colosseum—the building’s defining history.
The theatre’s curved travertine exterior preserves two arcaded orders: sturdy Doric half-columns below and more slender Ionic forms above. The third Roman level is lost. Rising directly from the ancient cavea, a plastered Renaissance palace with regular windows and roof terraces remains inhabited. The modern pedestrian route approaches the lower fornices but does not recreate ancient audience circulation. From the open archaeological ground, the relationship among arcades, vanished stage and later palace is clearer than from the busy road.
Julius Caesar began the theatre project in the southern Campus Martius, and Augustus enlarged and completed it, dedicating it to his nephew and intended heir Marcus Claudius Marcellus, who died in 23 BC. Inauguration occurred in 13 or 11 BC. The theatre held perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand spectators and continued in use into late antiquity. Medieval families transformed its elevated mass into fortification. Baldassarre Peruzzi built a palace for the Savelli on the upper structure in the sixteenth century; the Orsini later owned it. Municipal clearance and restoration between 1926 and 1932 removed surrounding construction and exposed the Roman arcades.
The Theatre of Marcellus differs in both form and function from the Colosseum. Theatre and amphitheatre organised spectators around different performance spaces; Marcellus had a semicircular cavea facing a stage. The palace above is not visual contamination to be mentally erased but evidence of the monument’s survival through use. The apparently clean archaeological foreground, by contrast, is a twentieth-century intervention. Look for blocked openings and varied masonry before admiring the classical orders: they show the long conversion from entertainment building to defensible structure, residence and civic monument.
Three re-erected columns stand for a sanctuary whose missing sculpture and political boundary extended far beyond them
Apollo’s coloured columns, Bellona’s foundations and the reconstructed pediment at Centrale Montemartini connect healing cult, war ritual and museum display.
Between the theatre and Portico of Octavia, three tall Corinthian columns with richly carved capitals and entablature mark the Temple of Apollo Sosianus. Their coloured stone and bright architectural fragments stand above a complex podium. Bellona’s neighbouring temple is less immediately legible, surviving largely through podium and foundation evidence. A reconstructed circular feature nearby may relate to purification. Major sculptures from Apollo’s pediment are not here: the Greek marble battle group has been reconstructed and displayed at Centrale Montemartini.
A temple to Apollo Medicus existed here by the fifth century BC, outside the sacred boundary where a foreign god and healing cult could be accommodated. Gaius Sosius rebuilt it in the late Republic, and its decoration was adjusted to the Augustan urban programme. The Temple of Bellona was vowed by Appius Claudius Caecus in 296 BC. Because it lay outside the pomerium, the Senate could meet there with commanders and magistrates forbidden to enter the sacred city boundary. A nearby war column supported the ritual declaration of hostilities.
The upright Apollo columns are a modern anastylosis assembled from surviving elements, not an intact temple corner left standing continuously. Read them with the absent pediment in mind: archaeology redistributed one building between site and museum. Bellona’s political function depended on invisible jurisdiction as much as architecture. The two sanctuaries therefore frame Rome’s relation to bodies and borders—healing, military command, triumph and war—before Augustus’s theatre fixed a new dynastic monument beside them.
An Augustan portico became a Severan ruin, medieval fish market and threshold to Sant’Angelo in Pescheria
The surviving propylon is one corner of a 119-by-132-metre complex whose later market life remains written into masonry and street name.
The monument is approached through a monumental entrance of columns, piers, entablature and damaged pediment whose visible fabric belongs largely to a Severan rebuilding. Only the south-eastern corner and vestibule survive from a four-sided complex that once contained temples, libraries and a public meeting hall. Sant’Angelo in Pescheria is embedded behind and within the ancient structures. A ramp and steps now connect the raised street with the archaeological level and the route toward the theatre.
Augustus rebuilt the earlier Portico of Metellus between 27 and 23 BC and dedicated it to his sister Octavia. After fire in 191, Septimius Severus and Caracalla restored the complex in 203; their phase dominates the entrance. In late antiquity and the Middle Ages, the area became Rome’s principal fish market, the Forum piscium or Pescheria Vecchia. A measuring stone linked to the portion of large fish owed to civic magistrates survives near the arch. Sant’Angelo was established in the early Middle Ages by inserting Christian space into the portico.
Do not use the standing entrance as a miniature image of the entire Augustan portico. Its fragment frames a lost precinct much larger than today’s lane. The fish market was not a brief misuse but a durable urban economy that named the church and district. Look for the brick arch replacing ancient columns and for the church fabric gripping the propylon. Those joints show adaptation more clearly than a digital reconstruction can: ancient ceremonial enclosure became market infrastructure and parish threshold.
The papal ghetto is a history of forced enclosure; the present Jewish quarter is a rebuilt and living urban district
A surviving narrow lane and four post-1870 blocks cannot reproduce the flood-prone enclosure demolished after emancipation, but they preserve traces of community geography.
Via della Reginella, Via di Sant’Ambrogio, Piazza delle Cinque Scole and the lanes behind the Portico retain a compressed pedestrian scale, inscriptions, doorways and food traditions associated with Jewish Rome. Yet the riverside zone is dominated by four large blocks raised above the former ground level after demolition. Via Catalana and Via del Tempio cut through this reconstructed fabric. The current quarter is active communal, religious, residential and commercial space, not an outdoor museum of segregation.
Rome’s Jewish community has lived continuously in the city for about 2,200 years. In 1555 Paul IV forced Jews to reside in a walled, unhealthy and flood-prone district and imposed signs, occupational restrictions and limits on property. The enclosure opened and closed under changing regimes but ended permanently in 1870 with the fall of papal temporal rule. Emancipation brought civil rights; in the following decades, however, the old ghetto was largely demolished, raised and rebuilt under the new capital’s planning and river-control schemes.
The surviving lanes preserve only part of the former ghetto’s street pattern. Use the museum’s reconstructed plans to locate lost gates, the Cinque Scole and earlier streets, then compare them with the four modern blocks. Emancipation and demolition are related but not identical stories: legal liberation did not preserve the built environment. The most responsible reading centres the continuous community rather than turning forced confinement into picturesque authenticity.
A noble-family square holds a public fountain whose famous turtles are later additions and modern copies
Della Porta’s water design and Landini’s bronze youths precede the turtles by decades, while the surrounding palaces record power beside the enclosed district.
The compact piazza is enclosed by sober Mattei and Costaguti palace façades. At its centre, an African-marble structure rises from a square basin: four shells receive water, four bronze youths rest their feet on dolphins, and their raised hands reach toward turtles on the upper rim. The composition feels seamless, but the turtles now visible are copies; the surviving originals are protected in the Capitoline Museums. The square’s intimacy makes it especially vulnerable to crowding and staged photography.
Giacomo della Porta designed the fountain in the late sixteenth century, and Taddeo Landini made the bronze figures. The waterwork originally belonged to the network that distributed the restored Acqua Vergine. The turtles were added during a 1658 restoration, probably under Bernini’s direction, creating the gesture that supplied the monument’s modern name. Repeated thefts removed turtles in 1906, 1944 and 1981. The noble palaces around the fountain belonged to Christian families whose privileges contrasted with restrictions imposed inside the nearby ghetto.
Separate the core fountain from its celebrated finishing detail. Landini’s youths and dolphins create a complete rising rhythm even before the turtles, while the seventeenth-century additions redirect four gestures toward the upper basin. Then widen the frame to the palaces. Calling Piazza Mattei simply part of the ghetto can erase the social boundary between aristocratic property and the forced Jewish enclosure nearby. The fountain belongs to a broader Renaissance water and patronage landscape at the edge of that history.
Emancipation produced a monumental synagogue while the museum preserves the material memory of the demolished Cinque Scole
Armanni and Costa’s square aluminium dome announces the community after 1870; textiles, silver and marble return the lost ghetto synagogues to view.
The Great Synagogue stands near the Tiber as a monumental pale building under a distinctive square-based aluminium dome visible across the district. Its richly decorated interior uses an early-twentieth-century language and houses an arrangement of bimah and ark shaped by the new building rather than copied exactly from the Roman rite’s earlier spaces. The Jewish Museum occupies the complex in seven thematic rooms. Its liturgical textiles, silver, manuscripts, documents and marble furnishings are not generic Judaica; much survives from the ghetto’s Cinque Scole.
After emancipation in 1870, Rome’s Jewish Community commissioned a synagogue on the site of the demolished ghetto as a public statement of equal citizenship and continuity. Osvaldo Armanni and Vincenzo Costa won the competition, and the building was inaugurated in 1904. The old Cinque Scole had gathered five ritual communities within one building from the ghetto period. Their furnishings were preserved and later integrated into museum collections; the Spanish Synagogue was installed within the complex in 1932 and received historic marbles in 1948.
The Great Synagogue belongs to the period after the ghetto’s enclosure, rather than to its surviving buildings. Its scale, dome and riverfront position belong to emancipation and to the rebuilt capital. The museum provides the bridge to the earlier enclosed quarter through objects whose mobility outlasted lost rooms. Read a parochet or silver Torah ornament as part of a family, ritual and institutional history, not only craftsmanship. Visits follow security and guided-access procedures that protect an active religious complex.
A date and individual names resist the conversion of persecution into anonymous historical background
The former ghetto was the epicentre, not the limit, of the Nazi raid that began before dawn across twenty-six zones of occupied Rome.
Largo 16 Ottobre names the public threshold beside the Portico after the date of the raid. Across the Jewish quarter and other Roman districts, small brass-covered stones embedded in ordinary pavements record names, birth dates, arrest, deportation and death. They are encountered at doorways rather than collected into one monumental plaza. The synagogue area also remembers later antisemitic violence, including the attack of 9 October 1982 in which the two-year-old Stefano Gaj Taché was killed.
Fascist racial laws of 1938 excluded Jewish citizens from schools, professions and public life. After German occupation of Rome, Nazi authorities extorted fifty kilograms of gold from the community in September 1943 and then looted archives and libraries. From about 5:30 on Saturday 16 October, units under Theodor Dannecker divided Rome into twenty-six zones and arrested Jewish residents without distinction of age, gender or health. More than a thousand people were deported toward Auschwitz-Birkenau; the Jewish Museum’s documentary panels record only sixteen survivors among those arrested that day.
Keep the chapter urban and personal. The raid was not confined to one picturesque quarter, and its victims were not an anonymous mass. Read one name without photographing residents at their threshold. The gold extortion did not buy protection; present it as part of an escalating sequence from fascist law to occupation, plunder, arrest and extermination. Largo 16 Ottobre makes the date visible, while distributed stones insist that persecution entered individual homes across the city.
Rome’s best-preserved ancient bridge carries its republican builder’s name and many centuries of repair
Two low arches, a flood opening and inscribed Republican masonry connect Sant’Angelo to the island more precisely than the bridge’s later legends.
Pons Fabricius crosses the left branch of the Tiber on two broad, slightly lowered arches that meet at a central pier. A smaller arch opens through that pier to reduce pressure during high water. Travertine facing covers a core of tufa and peperino; areas of brick belong to later repair. Marble herms with four faces stand on the parapet, giving the familiar name Ponte dei Quattro Capi. Their presence should not distract from the large Republican inscriptions naming Lucius Fabricius.
Lucius Fabricius, curator of roads, built the bridge in 62 BC to replace an earlier wooden crossing. Smaller inscriptions record repairs by Marcus Lollius and Quintus Aemilius Lepidus after flooding later in the first century BC. Imperial, medieval and early-modern works maintained the route. Eugene IV repaved it in 1447, and Innocent XI consolidated it and rebuilt parapets in 1679. The four-headed herms are ancient objects placed in a later arrangement; the story that they commemorate four executed quarrelling architects is legend.
Read the structure from water upward: two load-bearing arches, a central relief opening and a pedestrian deck whose continuous use required repair. ‘Best preserved’ does not mean untouched. The bridge survives because each regime intervened. The alternative medieval name Pons Iudaeorum records its position at the boundary of the Jewish district, while the compulsory-sermon church near the approach recalls coercion. Cross without turning the herm legend into the bridge’s main history; the inscribed public office of Fabricius is the stronger documentary voice.
A natural tufa core was reshaped as a stone ship and repeatedly assigned institutions of care
Geology, serpent legend, temple memory and an operating hospital explain the island more accurately than calling it a fossilised Roman ship.
The only urban island of the Tiber forms a narrow ship-like strip between two river branches. Travertine facing at the downstream end and traces of an obelisk-like mast helped ancient viewers read a stone vessel, but the island’s foundation is natural tufa with accumulated sediment. Hospital buildings occupy much of its north-west side. Fatebenefratelli remains an active care institution, so ambulances, patients, staff and clinical privacy take precedence over the visitor route.
Legend linked the island’s origin to grain thrown into the river after the expulsion of Tarquin; geology provides a firmer explanation. During a plague in 293 or 291 BC, Rome sought the cult of Aesculapius from Epidaurus. A serpent associated with the god was said to choose the island, where a healing sanctuary developed and the ship form was monumentalised. In 1582 the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God established the institution known as Fatebenefratelli, continuing an island association with care without implying direct institutional continuity from the pagan temple.
Separate three claims: the island is geologically natural; Roman patrons deliberately shaped it as a ship; healing institutions returned to the site across different religions and legal bodies. The serpent story is ancient religious narrative, not geological evidence. Look toward the travertine prow from the embankment, then return attention to present care. A hospital is not a scenic remnant, and its operation should not be interrupted for photographs or interior wandering.
A medieval imperial church and a substantially rebuilt bridge close the island route toward Trastevere
Otto III’s basilica, flood reconstruction, modern martyr memorial and nineteenth-century bridge widening complete an island shaped by replacement.
San Bartolomeo faces the island’s central piazza behind a modest Baroque façade and Romanesque bell tower. Inside, columns divide the nave and an ancient-looking wellhead marks the sanctuary’s layered devotional history. The basilica now includes a memorial to modern martyrs associated with the Community of Sant’Egidio. At the western end, Pons Cestius crosses toward Trastevere on three arches whose regular late-nineteenth-century appearance differs sharply from the more intact Pons Fabricius.
Emperor Otto III founded the church around 997–998 over the area traditionally associated with Aesculapius’s temple, initially honouring Adalbert and later Bartholomew. Floods repeatedly damaged the building; the catastrophic event of 1557 led to major seventeenth-century reconstruction by Orazio Torriani. Pons Cestius originated around the mid-first century BC and was rebuilt in late antiquity. Tiber embankment works widened this river channel, requiring substantial dismantling and a three-arch reconstruction in the 1890s that reused some ancient travertine.
Do not treat San Bartolomeo as the ancient temple converted intact into a church, or Pons Cestius as a complete Republican bridge. Both occupy ancient sites while showing decisive later reconstruction. The basilica’s current martyr memorial adds a global twentieth-century layer to an Ottonian foundation and an ancient healing place. Compare the two island exits: Fabricius retains a recognisably Republican structure through repair; Cestius demonstrates how modern river engineering could preserve a name and material while rebuilding the bridge’s form.
The district through time
From Republican cult and bridge building to Jewish continuity, forced enclosure, emancipation, persecution and present memorial practice, these dates keep community history visible beside archaeological chronology.
Cult sites of Apollo Medicus and Bellona develop outside the sacred city boundary.
Rome establishes the healing cult of Aesculapius on the Tiber Island.
Lucius Fabricius builds the stone bridge connecting the left bank to the island.
Augustus rebuilds Octavia’s portico and completes the Theatre of Marcellus.
Septimius Severus and Caracalla restore the fire-damaged Portico of Octavia.
Otto III founds the church later dedicated to Bartholomew on the island.
Paul IV forces Rome’s Jews into the walled, flood-prone ghetto.
The Turtle Fountain and Fatebenefratelli institution reshape civic water and island care.
The papal ghetto ends and Jewish residents receive emancipation under the Kingdom of Italy.
The old ghetto is demolished and rebuilt; the Great Synagogue is constructed and inaugurated.
Tiber embankment works substantially reconstruct Pons Cestius.
Modern clearance isolates the Theatre of Marcellus and surrounding archaeological monuments.
Fascist racial laws exclude Jewish citizens from education, professions and public life.
Nazi units raid Jewish homes across Rome and deport more than a thousand people.
Museum, worship, care and distributed memorials keep the district active rather than fossilised.
Before your visit
The lawns around the theatre are a modern clearance landscape; look for medieval and Renaissance reuse before reconstructing antiquity.
The Jewish Museum is essential for the lost Cinque Scole, ghetto plans, ritual objects and twentieth-century memory.
Synagogue and museum admission is controlled; avoid photographing guards, checkpoints or worship without permission.
Pause at Largo 16 Ottobre and individual name-stones without staging portraits or moving memorial objects.
Fabricius preserves a Republican structural identity; Cestius was substantially rebuilt for the modern embankments.
Fatebenefratelli is active clinical space; the island’s healing history does not authorise access beyond public routes.
Method and sources
The guide uses the Jewish Museum of Rome and Jewish Community material, Roma Capitale Tourism and Sovrintendenza sources current to 27 August 2026. It separates theatre from amphitheatre; ancient monuments from twentieth-century clearance; Apollo’s on-site columns from the museum-held pediment; Augustan portico from Severan fabric and medieval market; Rome’s 2,200-year Jewish continuity from the forced ghetto of 1555–1870; legal emancipation from demolition of the enclosed quarter; Great Synagogue from the lost Cinque Scole; the citywide Nazi raid from a ghetto-only narrative; natural island geology from ship legend; and ancient foundations from medieval, early-modern and modern institutions of worship and care.
All ten images are original Merlintravel editorial watercolours based on documented present-day conditions. They are illustrations, not substitutes for archaeological plans. Opening hours, tickets, accessible routes, temporary exhibitions and conservation work can change; consult the linked official pages shortly before visiting.