Beneath Campo Marzio, the remains of the Temple of Isis and Serapis, opened to visitors after 61 years of excavation and restoration, reveal the deep connection between Egypt, empire and the Rome we see today.
“We shouldn’t live off tourism. We should live off culture.” Those words have stayed with me for days because they say so much about the state of travel right now. Checklists. Photographs. Schedules. I heard them at ISEUM in Rome, from a gentleman named Corrado, and they landed all the harder because of something our guide, Margherita, had said only minutes before.
As she walked us around the former perimeter of the Temple of Isis and Serapis, she pointed to the church right around the corner, Sant’Ignazio di Loyola, and explained how it had become a social media phenomenon. An influencer had filmed its frescoed ceiling reflected in a mirror and, ever since, hundreds of people have queued to recreate the same video.
Many look at the ceiling through their screens before they have properly looked up at it themselves. That tells us something about the way we travel now. We move through the world prompted to capture rather than understand, often leaving with a great deal seen and very little comprehended.
So what does that actually leave us with in the end? I had gone to ISEUM expecting an archaeological site. What I found was almost the opposite of the church next door.
A space that gives you a map, not a photograph
ISEUM is an archaeological space preserving part of the Camigliano Arch, the eastern entrance to the Iseum Campense, the great sanctuary dedicated to the Egyptian deities Isis and Serapis in ancient Rome.
The recovery of the site was promoted by Enrico Ducrot, founder of the historic luxury travel house Viaggi dell’Elefante and Ecoluxury Retreats of the World, as a project intended to give something back.
ISEUM is not a place that immediately makes you think, “I have to post this”. There is no mirror trick, no view that can be understood in a few seconds. What it gives you instead is a map, a connecting line drawn through ancient worlds, commerce and materials, through the movement of stone and belief that produced so much of the beauty we still walk past today.
Rather than attempting to recreate what has been lost, ISEUM gives visitors the tools to recognise what remains. It hands you a way of seeing and then sends you back out into the city to use it.
Walking a temple that is no longer there
The visit begins outside, which is not what you expect. Before we went down, Margherita walked us through the surrounding streets, tracing how far the ancient sanctuary once reached. This was no modest shrine.
The cult of Isis had arrived in Rome, resisted at first and then embraced, and the complex that rose here in Campo Marzio was vast. It included courtyards, obelisks, sphinxes and a temple at its center, spread across an area far larger than the block we were standing on.
To see it at all, you have to temporarily switch off the shops, traffic and buildings in front of you and imagine another Rome underneath. Only then do you go down. And in Rome, going down is never simply a matter of stairs.
Below the level of the modern street, the remains of the Camigliano Arch stand where they spent centuries. They were first uncovered in 1969, then excavated in 1980 and 1981 by the architect Carlo Balbino, who had acquired the area and worked with Rome’s archaeological superintendence to bring the Roman floor level and the northern section of the arch back to light. Its recent recovery and opening to the public came later, through the project promoted by Enrico Ducrot and Ecoluxury Travel.
Standing beneath a contemporary building, looking at an ancient arch incorporated into its foundations, you finally feel something that Rome usually only tells you in the abstract. We say easily that Rome is a city built upon itself. Here, you see exactly what that means.
Each age built over, around and through the one before it. Temples became foundations. Columns were removed from one building and placed inside another. Ancient stone was lifted, carried away and given a second life inside a medieval church or Renaissance palace.
The Rome we walk through today is only its most recent surface. Everything else is still beneath it, inside it, or scattered across the city above.
The stones that map an empire
I visited ISEUM only a few months after travelling through Egypt for my honeymoon, and that turned out to matter more than I expected.
The part of the visit that moved me most was not the architecture. It was a collection of stones. Around 200 polished samples of colored marble and decorative stone are gathered from across the ancient world and displayed side by side.
On paper, a wall of stone samples sounds like the least memorable part of an archaeological space. They arrived in Rome from everywhere the empire reached. Egypt, Greece, Asia Minor and North Africa. They were quarried, hauled overland and transported across the sea, then worked by craftspeople and used to decorate the temples, villas, public buildings and palaces of the capital.
Displayed together, they stop being geology and become a map,the Roman Empire is no longer a shape colored in on a page. It becomes a living network of quarries, ports, ships, trade routes and hands. You begin to understand it through the physical materials it was made from.
Finding Aswan in Rome
Then I recognzed one of them: granite from Aswan. Only a few months earlier, I had stood above the Nile near the quarries where that same type of stone was extracted and walked through temples built from it.
Finding it again here, beneath a building in Campo Marzio, closed a circle I had not known I was drawing.
In Egypt, I had seen the stone at its source. In Rome, I could see how far it had travelled and how it had been absorbed into another city and another civilization. History stopped feeling like a series of separate chapters.
Stone quarried in Egypt could cross the Mediterranean, become part of a Roman temple and, centuries later, be removed and reused inside a Christian church or Renaissance palace.
The monuments of Egypt and the churches of Rome began to feel less like separate stories. They were connected by materials, trade routes, people and ideas that had continued moving across the ancient world.
This is one of the connections ISEUM allows you to understand. Egypt did not remain on the Nile. Its gods, imagery, obelisks and materials travelled to the centre of the Roman Empire and became part of Roman life.
Several of Rome’s Egyptian obelisks are believed to have come from this sanctuary, including the one balanced on the back of Bernini’s elephant in Piazza della Minerva and the one now standing above the fountain in front of the Pantheon.
Once you understand the Iseum Campense, these objects no longer feel like isolated curiosities, they become fragments of a much larger story.
Rome becomes the exhibition
This is what makes ISEUM different from almost anywhere I have visited. It changes what happens after you leave. Once you have seen those stones together, the collection stops being a display and becomes a vocabulary.
You walk outside and Rome rearranges itself around what you now know how to read. You look more closely at the floor of a church. You wonder where a column came from. A slab of red, green or yellow marble is no longer simply decoration. It has an origin, a journey and a history that ended in the building in front of you. The visit does not end at the door, Rome itself becomes the second half of it.
What we are really left with
As I walked back past Sant’Ignazio di Loyola, Corrado’s words returned to me. “We shouldn’t live off tourism. We should live off culture.”
I do not take that as a rejection of travel. Travel is one of the most powerful ways of reaching culture. It can bring us into contact with places, people, histories and ideas we may never otherwise have encountered.
The difference lies in how we travel. You can move through a place, or you can allow it to change the way you see. ISEUM asks the harder thing.
It will not hand you the photograph that defines your trip. It asks you to slow down, imagine a temple that is no longer standing and connect an arch below ground with the obelisks, sculptures and coloured stones scattered across the city above.
It gives context instead of spectacle. And context stays with you. It changes what you notice the next day, the next time you enter a church and perhaps even the next time you travel somewhere new.
That, to me, is where tourism becomes culture.
If you want to visit ISEUM
ISEUM is located at Via del Piè di Marmo 26, at the corner of Via di Sant’Ignazio, a short walk from the Pantheon and Piazza Venezia.
Visits are guided and arranged in advance through the official ISEUM website.
The experience begins outside, tracing the footprint of the lost sanctuary, before moving down into the archaeological space and the collection of ancient decorative stones.
Go with enough time to listen. The value of ISEUM lies in understanding where the temple stood, what remains of it and how its story continues to surface throughout Rome.
You begin at ISEUM. Then you walk back out into the city and understand more.
