Rome's Metro Line C under construction
Proving Rome can build forward without erasing backward.
Rome, Italy has opened one of the most improbable subway stations ever attempted, threading modern transit beneath the Colosseum and the Via dei Fori Imperiali with the patience of an archaeologist and the nerve of an engineer.
After more than a decade of excavation, delay, and discovery, the Colosseo–Fori Imperiali station on Metro Line C is now carrying passengers thirty meters below ground, into a space where infrastructure and history finally stop pretending they belong to separate worlds.
The station is a modern adventure set inside an ancient site. It is a true descent through time. As passengers move downward from street level, the architecture refuses to smooth over what lies beneath. Glass walls open onto ancient stone wells, the remains of first-century dwellings, fragments of bath complexes, and the small, intimate objects of daily
Roman life uncovered during construction such as oil lamps, pottery shards, tools, and architectural fragments, appear along the route not as trophies but as witnesses, quietly asserting that the city has always been layered, and always will be.
This was not an aesthetic flourish added at the end. The station was conceived from the beginning as an archeological space as much as a transit one. Engineers and archaeologists worked in tandem, often redesigning the station mid-stream as new discoveries emerged from the soil.
Structural elements were shifted. Platforms were nudged. In some cases, ruins were left precisely where they were found, suspended in place and incorporated into the station itself.
The result feels less like a museum you visit than a place you pass through and slowly absorb. Above ground, the location could not be more charged. The station sits beside the Colosseum, along the broad imperial avenue that slices through the ancient forums.
Below ground, it finally stitches Rome’s eastern neighborhoods into the historic core, offering a long-awaited interchange between Metro Line C and the older Line B.
For the first time, riders can cross into the center without surfacing into traffic or tourism, emerging instead within walking distance of the Roman Forum, the Arch of Constantine, and the Palatine Hill.
Construction began in earnest in 2013, though the project had been imagined years earlier. Progress was slow, sometimes agonizingly so, but the delays were largely unavoidable. Rome’s subsoil is less earth than archive, and nearly every meter excavated revealed something that demanded attention.
Engineers relied on ground freezing, reinforced diaphragm walls, and top-down excavation techniques to protect the monuments above while carving out space below.
The deepest public levels descend more than thirty meters, making this one of the city’s most profound underground spaces, both literally and historically. The project was delivered through a collaboration between Rome’s transit authority and major Italian construction firms, including Webuild and Vianini Lavori, under constant archaeological supervision.
There is no single signature architect here, no ego asserting itself over the site. The design is restrained, almost deferential. Concrete, steel, and glass are used sparingly, allowing light, depth, and time to do most of the work. It feels Roman in the oldest sense of the word: practical, patient, and quietly monumental.
The cost reflects the ambition. Metro Line C, once fully realized, is expected to reach roughly seven billion euros, with the Colosseum extension representing one of its most complex and expensive phases.
Critics will continue to argue about delays and overruns. Yet standing on the platform, watching trains arrive amid walls that have seen two thousand years pass, it becomes difficult to imagine a cheaper way to do this properly. Further extensions of Line C are planned, pushing west toward Piazza Venezia and eventually in the direction of the Vatican.
Whether those phases proceed as envisioned remains to be seen. What is already clear is that the Colosseo–Fori Imperiali station has changed the conversation. It proves that Rome can build forward without erasing backward.
This station does not seal the past behind velvet ropes. It places it into daily life. Thousands of people will pass through these spaces each day, not to marvel, but to commute, moving quietly through centuries on their way to work or home. Beneath the Colosseum, the ancient and the modern no longer compete. They coexist, not as spectacle, but as routine.
