Ostia Antica site features

The site reads as a town rather than a ruin field. The decumanus maximus runs the length of it, and almost everything worth seeing is a short turn off that line. The Forum sits at the centre of the old castrum, narrow and elongated, flanked by porticoes, with Hadrian's Capitolium dominating one end and the temple of Rome and Augustus -- put up under Tiberius -- facing it from the other. The Basilica and the Curia, where the decurions met, open off its western side. The large Forum Baths, built under Antoninus Pius, stand to the south-east.

Around the forum the city is residential and commercial in roughly equal measure. Apartment blocks survive with their shopfronts, courtyards and staircases; the better flats are arranged around a medianum, a central room lit from the street with reception rooms at either end and bedrooms, kitchen and latrine behind. Several keep their decoration: the House of the Child Hercules is named for a painting of the infant Hercules strangling serpents, and the House of the Painted Ceiling has red and yellow frescoed panels with small figures set in painted architecture.

The late antique houses are the luxury end. The Domus of Cupid and Psyche, of the second quarter of the 4th century, still has marble wall panels and opus sectile floors around a hallway lit from a small garden with a nymphaeum. The Domus della Fortuna Annonaria, built in the 2nd century over earlier shops and altered into the 5th, has a porticoed internal courtyard, an apsidal reception room and a heated bedroom.

Finds from the excavations are kept on site in the Museo Ostiense, which is the sensible last stop.

Ostia is a street plan rather than a set of monuments, so the list below is a route as much as an inventory -- almost everything on it is a short turn off the decumanus maximus.

• The decumanus maximus -- the main street, carrying the line of the Via Ostiense from Rome through the whole site.
• The Forum -- laid out under Augustus, transformed under Hadrian, with the Capitolium at one end and the temple of Rome and Augustus at the other.
• The theatre -- built by Agrippa in 18-12 BC, restored in the Severan age and later used as a fortress.
• The insulae -- multi-storey apartment blocks with shops, courtyards and external staircases, the best surviving evidence for how ordinary Romans were housed.
• Eighteen Mithraea -- the number found on site, a measure of how popular the cult of Mithras was in the port.
• The Ostia Synagogue -- the earliest synagogue yet identified in Europe, probably built in the late 1st century AD and altered repeatedly between the 2nd and 4th centuries, including the installation of a Torah shrine.
• The Capitolium -- Hadrian's temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, among the first things visible from the forum.
• Domus of Cupid and Psyche -- 4th-century luxury housing with marble panelling and opus sectile floors.
• The Porta Laurentina -- a tuff gate between towers 5.85 m high, still showing the grooves for its portcullis.
• Museo Ostiense -- the on-site museum holding the finds from the excavations.