From Wikipedia: "Defined by contemporaries as one of the wonders of the world ( Pliny, Naturalis Historia XXXVI 102), it was built under Vespasian from 74 AD and concluded by Domitian. The temple was inaugurated in 75 AD after the triumph of the Jewish war, and dedicated to the Pax Augusta of the Empire, restored by the Flavian dynasty according to imperial propaganda.
Septimius Severus restored the complex after it was badly damaged by a fire in 192.
The complex lost its public function prematurely and already in the fourth century the spaces were used for productive activities, moved here from the nearby site where the Basilica of Maxentius was built.
The forum consisted of a vast complex of buildings with a total area of about 135 x 100 meters.
The remains of this forum are today very scarce, located on the side of the Roman Forum (traces of a monumental entrance) beyond Via dei Fori Imperiali and incorporated into the church of Santi Cosma e Damiano.
The layout of the complex is however known to us thanks to the Forma Urbis Severiana, which was preserved in this complex: the large marble slab representing the map of Rome (at the beginning of the third century) was affixed to a wall of one of the rooms of the forum of the Peace. The holes of the grappas used for fixing the slabs are still visible on the outer wall of the convent of the Saints Cosmas and Damian.
The Forum of Peace consisted of a large square arranged as a garden, with arcades on three sides (lateral, decorated also with niches, and back), while the front side was decorated with African marble columns along the wall, recalling a peristyle however. As usual, the side opposite the main entrance was centered on the actual temple, surrounded by a series of symmetrical classrooms. Here there was a library, the remains of the sack of Jerusalem (with the famous treasure of Solomon's temple) and a real public museum, with a very rich series of Greek works of art transported here by Vespasian following the obliteration of Domus Aurea due to thedamnatio memoriae of the last emperor Giulio-Claudio.
The central area was a garden, with flower beds, podiums decorated with fountains and statues (first "locked" in the Domus Aurea Nero).
The temple, with a sort of hexastyle pronaos, an apsidal hall and the altar in the square in front, was in fact incorporated into the portico, except for the type of front of the pronaos. This element, together with the presence of the garden in the square, was an unusual element for the city's architecture, if not the first certainly one of the first, inspired perhaps by Eastern Hellenistic prototypes. Ultimately then the square came to be configured as an element of the temple itself, "embraced" by the colonnades that unraveled from it. In this sense the pre-Constantinian denomination as "temple" rather than "forum" should be explained.
In 2015, 7 columns are reconstructed with the original pieces using the anastylosis technique." (
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