The Roman forum occupies the high ground at the centre of the peninsula, and its open space gives you the clearest sense of the city's Roman-era scale. Around it cluster the remains of public buildings: a basilica, a nymphaeum, and the extensive thermae (public baths) whose heating channels and hypocaust pillars are visible in the floor. The baths were fed by an aqueduct that brought water from springs further inland.
The forum itself is largely open, the paving stones either robbed or buried under centuries of soil. But the outlines of the porticoes and the arrangement of civic buildings around the central space are legible enough to imagine the city in its 2nd-century AD peak, when Butrint — renamed Buthrotum — was a prosperous Roman colony.