Rome's forgotten city — the best-preserved Roman ruins outside Italy
Jerash is an open-air museum of Roman urban planning that most travellers skip on the way to Petra — a city of 3,000-year-old foundations, a perfectly intact oval forum, two colonnaded streets, a 3,000-seat theatre where the acoustics still work, and triumphal arches that archaeologists are still excavating. One hour north of Amman, it is the most complete Roman provincial city outside Italy, yet you can walk its Cardo Maximus in near-solitude on a weekday morning.
Ancient Gerasa was settled as early as the 8th century BCE and rose to prominence as one of the Decapolis — the league of ten Hellenistic cities east of the Jordan River. The Romans rebuilt it grandly under Trajan (98–117 CE), and it reached its peak population of 15,000–20,000 in the 2nd century CE before a catastrophic earthquake in 749 CE levelled most of the region's cities; Jerash was largely abandoned and silted over until archaeologists began excavations in the 1920s.