Trajan's Market
— the brick the afternoon settles into.
Not only on a wall.
“The complex of brick halls and shops Trajan and Apollodorus of Damascus carved into the side of the Quirinal Hill, just after 100 AD. Six terraced levels of tabernae open onto a great curved hemicycle that still defines the silhouette above the Forum. For centuries it has been called the world's oldest shopping mall, though historians now read it more as an administrative quarter that happened to include shops. What survives is the brick, opus latericium, the colour of slow afternoons. The medieval Torre delle Milizie, added a thousand years later, still keeps watch above.
Trajan's Market, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Trajan's Market (Mercati di Traiano) is a multi-level complex of brick halls, vaulted corridors, and small chambers built into the slope of the Quirinal Hill, in the rione of Monti in central Rome. It was completed around 110 AD as part of Emperor Trajan's larger Forum project, the last and largest of the Imperial Fora, designed by the Greek-Syrian architect Apollodorus of Damascus. The complex rises in six terraces above the open square of the Forum and contained more than 150 tabernae arranged around a great curved hemicycle. Today the surviving structure houses the Museo dei Fori Imperiali, entered from Via Quattro Novembre on the Quirinal side.
The walls are opus latericium, the Roman brick-faced concrete technique perfected in the early second century AD. The clay was worked in commercial brickyards along the Tiber, and stamps from those yards still mark some of the courses, identifying owners, consuls, and the years they were made. The hemicycle's three storeys carry their own weight and the thrust of the hill behind them, which is why so much of the structure survives largely intact after nineteen centuries. The Torre delle Milizie, raised on top of the complex in the early 1200s by the Conti family, leans slightly from the earthquake that struck Rome in 1348 but still stands above the Forum.
The complex is open daily as the Museo dei Fori Imperiali, with the entrance on Via Quattro Novembre near Piazza Venezia. Standard hours run roughly 9:30 to 19:30, with last entry an hour before closing and reduced hours on December 25 and January 1. The view from the Via Biberatica, the small paved street that runs through the middle terrace, looks out across the columns of Trajan's Forum to the Vittoriano on the far side. The hemicycle is best photographed from the parapet just below the Torre delle Milizie, late in the afternoon when the brick takes on the colour the painters call Roman ochre.