The Roman Forum sat in a swampy valley between seven hills until the Etruscans drained it with the Cloaca Maxima, a sewer system six hundred metres of which still diverts Rome's excess water into the Tiber.

What followed was eleven centuries as the nerve centre of a city of one million people. 300 senators debated in the Curia, where Cicero delivered his Second Catiline Oration and where later emperors stripped the Senate of power while keeping it as a theatre. At the Rostra, Mark Antony gave his famous eulogy for Caesar, lifting the dictator's blood-soaked toga on a spear while reading the Senate's decree declaring Caesar divine and their oath to protect him. The crowd, seeing the contradiction, turned into a mob and seized Caesar's body for cremation.

The Forum's ruins span 1,000 years of building. Emperors constructed temples over temples, incorporated old staircases into new buildings, and turned the valley into what one guide calls a "zigzagging trip through time." The Temple of Antoninus and Faustina shows deep grooves in its columns from failed medieval attempts to dismantle them. When it became a church, excavations revealed the ground level had risen six metres from accumulated debris.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace the Forum's evolution from marketplace to imperial showcase, explaining how Vestal Virgins wielded political power while tending the eternal flame, revealing where severed heads were displayed on the Rostra as political warnings, and connecting the Basilica of Maxentius's soaring vaults to the architectural legacy that shaped Western government buildings.