THREE MILLENNIA OF PAVEMENT: THE HISTORY OF THE ROME MARATHON

At mile 25 of the 2010 Rome Marathon, with the Colosseum coming into view, Siraj Gena pulled off his shoes and ran the final stretch barefoot. He crossed the finish in 2:08:39 — then the course record — and stood there in socked feet on the pavement, explaining that he had done it to honor Abebe Bikila, who had won the 1960 Olympic marathon through these same streets without shoes. It was the 50th anniversary of Bikila's run. Gena said he felt he had to do something. The gesture was unplanned, spontaneous, and entirely in keeping with what Rome does to runners.

The Rome Marathon has never been a race that operates solely on times. It operates on weight — the weight of three millennia of history pressing down on every kilometer, the cobblestones underfoot, the monuments looming overhead. That it has also become one of the fastest urban marathon courses in Europe is not a contradiction. It is the tension that defines the race.

The Difficult Birth

The Rome Marathon did not arrive cleanly. A first edition ran in 1982, but the course was short — measuring 42.075 km rather than the standard 42.195 — and the organizational infrastructure was fragile. Two editions in the 1990s were cancelled outright due to logistical failures, including a shortage of race bibs at the start. The race served as the Italian Marathon Championship in 1983 and 1986, which lent it some official standing, but those early years left the event's reputation unsteady.

The modern race dates to 1995, when the Italia Marathon Club stepped in to rebuild it. Even then the first revived course was 700 meters short. By 1996, a properly measured course was in place and the race began accumulating the results and the infrastructure that serious athletes require.

It had a symbolic inheritance to draw on. On April 2, 1906, Italian runner Dorando Pietri won a marathon across Rome, finishing at Piazza di Siena — a detail the modern organizers invoke as a founding legend. And Bikila's 1960 Olympic run on the Appian Way, shoeless under floodlights, remains the most famous act of running ever performed in this city. The race carries both of those threads.

The Course

The start and finish sit on Via dei Fori Imperiali, the wide boulevard that runs between Piazza Venezia and the Colosseum, with the ruins of the Roman Forum visible behind iron fencing on both sides. Runners leave in the shadow of the Forum, pass Circus Maximus, loop through Trastevere, then follow the Tiber embankment north through Castel Sant'Angelo toward the Vatican. The route crosses the Tiber roughly six times across the full distance.

From the Vatican the course pulls east, climbing briefly toward Piazza del Popolo before descending back through the historic center — Via del Corso, the Spanish Steps, Piazza Navona, the Pantheon — and returning to the Colosseum finish.

Approximately 7 km of the course runs on cobblestones. These sections, concentrated around the Forum and the Trastevere neighborhood, are the race's defining physical challenge. No amount of fitness fully prepares a runner for sustained cobblestone running; the surface absorbs energy in ways that standard road racing does not. Asbel Rutto, who set the current men's course record of 2:06:24 in 2024, said afterward that the cobblestones were his biggest obstacle even while running the fastest time ever on the course.

The total elevation gain is roughly 100 meters. The course is not pancake flat, but neither is it technical. Under favorable conditions — cool temperatures, no wind — it is capable of fast times.

The Millennium Edition

On January 1, 2000, the Rome Marathon did something no other major road race has done before or since. It moved its start to St. Peter's Square. Pope John Paul II gave a benediction. The Bells of Saint Peter's replaced the starter's pistol. Tegla Loroupe of Kenya won the women's race.

The Millennium Edition is regularly cited as one of the singular moments in the sport's history — not because of the winning times, but because of the setting and what it represented. The race had secured backing from IAAF president Primo Nebiolo and was treated as a civic and religious ceremony as much as an athletic event. Nothing quite like it has been replicated.

Records and the Question of Speed

For most of its first decade, the Rome Marathon was a scenic race that produced respectable times rather than course record attempts. The cobblestones and the course routing through dense historic streets meant that true speed required overcoming the surface as well as the distance.

That began to change in the late 2000s. Benjamin Kiptoo Kolum of Kenya ran 2:07:18 in 2009, establishing a mark that would stand for 13 years. Gena's 2:08:39 the following year was the barefoot tribute run; his time was slower than the record, but the manner of it left the stronger imprint.

In 2022 the dam broke. Fikre Bekele Tefera of Ethiopia ran 2:06:48, finally erasing Kolum's long-standing benchmark. The top three men that day all finished under the old record, signaling a shift in how elite athletes were approaching the course.

Rutto's 2:06:24 in 2024 pushed the record further. The then-22-year-old ran his marathon debut through negative splits, passing halfway in 1:02:36 and pulling away to a 1 minute 27 second margin of victory. A 2:06 marathon with a four-minute gap to the next finisher is a statement about both the runner and the course.

The women's record has stood longer. Alemu Megertu ran 2:22:52 in 2019 and no one has seriously challenged it since. The depth in the women's field at Rome has historically lagged behind the men, though that has started to shift as organizers have invested in recruiting more elite women.

Stefano Baldini won the men's race in 1998, six years before claiming Olympic gold in Athens in 2004. He has called Rome his favorite marathon course. Italy has produced six total women's champions and three men's, the last being Alberico Di Cecco in 2005. Kenya and Ethiopia have dominated since.

Betty Chepkwony won back-to-back women's titles in 2023 and 2025, the only athlete in the modern era to win Rome twice.

Growth and the European Marathon Classics

For most of its existence the Rome Marathon was Italy's premier road race but a secondary event on the global calendar, sitting well below the Abbott World Marathon Majors in prestige and prize money. That positioning has shifted in the last five years.

Between 2021 and 2025 the field size grew from roughly 5,000 finishers to 21,926 — the sixth-largest marathon in Europe. For the 2026 edition the cap sits at 36,000 bibs, and organizers reported it sold out four months in advance. Roughly 70 percent of participants are international, representing 130 nations. The scale of that growth reflects both the organizational overhaul undertaken after 2019 and the broader surge in marathon participation globally.

The race carries a World Athletics Gold Label, one tier below Platinum. The Platinum designation is largely reserved for the Abbott World Marathon Majors and a small number of other historically elite events; Gold Label status places Rome in the tier just below that, alongside marathons in Vienna, Valencia, and Frankfurt.

In February 2026, the organizers of eight European road races announced the formation of the European Marathon Classics, a new series that groups Rome, London, Vienna, Madrid, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Lisbon, and Frankfurt under a shared identity and performance bonus structure. The 2026 Rome Marathon on March 22 will serve as the first official stage of the series. It is a positioning move by European races to create a comparable structure to the Abbott Majors, and Rome is its first face.

What the Race Is

The Rome Marathon has spent 40 years navigating a tension that most major road races do not face: it is running through a place that was not built for running. The Colosseum was built for combat. The Forum was built for politics. Piazza Navona was built on a chariot-racing track. Running 42 kilometers through all of it in under 2:07 requires treating the history as backdrop while the cobblestones treat your legs as obstacle courses.

Gena understood this in 2010. He ran the fastest time on the course and then stripped off his shoes for the last 500 meters, because the history demanded acknowledgment. Rutto understood it differently in 2024, grinding through the cobblestones with the most clinical marathon debut in the race's records.

Both are correct responses. Rome accommodates both.

The 2026 edition will send 36,000 runners through the same streets on March 22, past the same Forum columns and under the same Castel Sant'Angelo walls, in what will be the opening stage of a new European series. Whether anyone challenges Rutto's 2:06:24 or Megertu's 2:22:52 is a question the course will answer. The cobblestones will be there either way.

The 2026 edition added another chapter, with a course record and dramatic finish at the Colosseum.