As a result of my research a knew a lot of this great information already but it's great to see how History.com and the design firm Column 5 put it all into such an easily digestible visual.
Allow me a tiny bit of commentary before you dig in below.
If not, now you can! This video was set about 200 years after my novel's central character lived, but it still gives a great flavor of what Rome would have been like in ancient times. While the Colosseum wasn't there, nor the Circus Maximus, most of the other major buildings were there in the time that Apicius lived. He would have walked on the stones of the Roman Forum, visited the Temple of Jupiter, looked up through the oculus of The Pantheon. Such power there is in history!
http://vimeo.com/32038695