Take a Trip to Ancient Rome

Ever wondered what Rome’s Coliseum, Forum, and Pantheon looked like in their prime? The already addictive Google Earth today offers a peek with Ancient Rome 3D: the city as it looked in 320 A.D., complete with 6,700 buildings and 250 place marks linking to key sites. “This is another step in creating a virtual time machine,” Bernard Frischer of the University of Virginia, which worked with Google on the Roman reconstruction, told the BBC. Rome is the first historical city to be added to Google Earth, and the 3D models are based on Plastico di Roma Antica, a plaster-of-paris model of the city built between 1933 and 1974.