Arch of Trajan, Ancona · Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Arcus Traiani

Arch of Trajan

ArchItalia · Ancona, ItalyBuilt 115 CE

About

Rome's senate raised this marble arch on the mole of Ancona's harbor in 115 CE to thank Trajan for paying out of his own pocket to expand the port, calling the improved crossing a safer gateway to Italy. Apollodorus of Damascus, the same architect behind Trajan's Column and Forum, designed it: a single arched passage on a tall limestone podium, faced in imported Greek marble and originally topped with six bronze statues of the emperor's family, long since stripped for their metal. By 117 CE the arch was barely two years old, the newest monument on a harbor Trajan had just finished remaking.

What happened here

It carries no gate and defends nothing. An arch marks a threshold — a boundary, a road junction, the entrance to a forum — and it exists to make you look up while you pass under it. The attic carries the dedication in bronze letters set into cut sockets; the letters go missing and the sockets stay. The panels beneath show the campaign being celebrated, arranged so that the version of events the emperor prefers is the one at eye level. Traffic goes through it all day, ox carts scraping the jambs. A triumph passes under it once, if at all; the rest of its working life is as a landmark, a meeting point and a shaded spot for someone selling something.

In ancient writing

CIL, dedicatory inscription IX 5894
The arch's own surviving inscription honors Trajan for making 'the entrance to Italy safer' (tutiorem accessum Italiae) and names his wife Plotina and sister Marciana alongside him.