House of the Knights of Rhodes

This area was affected by demolition works which between 1924 and 1932 led to the opening of Via dei Fori Imperiali, resulting in the disappearance of the medieval structures of the monastery of San Basilio and the sixteenth-century ones of the Dominican Convent of the SS. Annunziata. In 1466, Pope Paul II entrusted his nephew Cardinal Marco Barbo with the administration of the priory of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, a hospital order which at the beginning of the thirteenth century had occupied the church and the monastery of the Basilian monks, which had arisen since the century above the Temple of Mars Ultor. The card. Barbo promoted a series of restorations that gave the building the appearance that can still be admired today: the same workers who worked on the nearby Palazzo della Repubblica in Venice were probably used. Having crossed the hall of honor with the flags of the order and the arengario for speeches, the loggia room with the re-composition of the attic of the porticoes of the Forum of Augustus, some rooms with ancient wooden ceilings, sculptures, and paintings of various eras, you enter the airy eight-arched loggia overlooking the Forum.