Archaeologists have discovered a temple in Italy which has drawn comparisons with the Pergamon altar, an ancient Greek monument

A Roman temple the size of St Paul’s Cathedral has been found by a Cambridge University-led team in central Italy.

The building, which was colonnaded on three sides, occupied a site 120m long and 60m wide. It was discovered a few feet below the topsoil of Falerii Novi, a ruined town about 30 miles north of Rome that is thought to have housed about 2,500 people during the last centuries of the Roman republic.

There is little to be seen at Falerii today beyond a ruined basilica, the ghost of a theatre and a superb defensive gate. In its heyday, however, it had at least eight temples, including the vast new discovery, according to academics who examined the site with a radar device hitched to…