WHERE ROME BEGAN
Palatine Hill: Where Rome Began
The hill of the founding myth and the Iron Age huts, of Republican mansions, Augustus's home and Domitian's vast palace — the hill that gave us the word palace.
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The Palatine is the most storied of Rome's seven hills, because this is where Romans believed their city was born. Legend placed the cave of the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus at its foot, and had Romulus found the city on the Palatine itself. Remarkably, archaeology lends the story a little support: excavations have uncovered post-holes and traces of Iron Age huts on the hill, dating to roughly the eighth century BC — the very period tradition assigned to the founding. Whether or not a man named Romulus ever existed, people were certainly living here at Rome's beginning. Standing on the Palatine, you are on the ground the Romans themselves regarded as the origin of everything that followed — the mythic founding and the archaeological one in the same place.
The address of the Republic's elite
Long before the emperors, the Palatine was Rome's most fashionable neighbourhood, the hill where the Republic's leading families chose to live. Its position — high above the Forum, catching the breeze, close to the centre yet above the crowds — made it the ancient equivalent of the best address in the city. Cicero had a house here; so, reputedly, did Mark Antony and other prominent men of the age. It is no accident that the very word "palace," and its equivalents across European languages, derives from Palatium, the name of this hill: the place became so identified with grand residences that its name turned into the word for them. When Augustus made his home here, he was building on ground already synonymous with power and prestige.
Augustus and the first imperial homes
Rome's first emperor, Augustus, was born on or near the Palatine and deliberately made it his residence, setting a precedent every emperor after him would follow. Careful to avoid the appearance of a king, he lived in what was, by imperial standards, a relatively modest house, alongside the so-called House of Livia, named for his wife. Both preserve extraordinary wall paintings — richly coloured Roman frescoes of architecture, gardens and figures, among the finest to survive anywhere — and access to them is limited and sometimes separately ticketed. Augustus also raised a great temple to Apollo up here, tying his own home to the gods. This is where the idea of the emperor living on the Palatine — and the very word palace — truly begins.
Domitian's palace: the emperor as a god
The Palatine's dominant ruins belong to the vast palace complex built for the emperor Domitian at the end of the first century AD, generally credited to the architect Rabirius. It came in parts: the Domus Flavia, the public and ceremonial wing, with grand audience halls where the emperor received the world; the Domus Augustana, the private imperial residence on several descending levels; and a large sunken garden shaped like a stadium, the so-called Hippodrome, for the emperor's leisure. The scale was deliberately overwhelming, designed to impress on every visitor that its owner was more than an ordinary man. For centuries this remained the working seat of Roman power, and its towering brick shells still crown the hill, giving the best sense anywhere of how emperors actually lived.
The Renaissance gardens on top
One of the Palatine's surprises is a layer of beauty draped over the ruins many centuries later. In the sixteenth century the powerful Farnese family laid out one of the first true botanical gardens in Europe across the top of Domitian's buried palace — the Farnese Gardens, or Horti Farnesiani. Terraces, tree-lined walks, a pavilion and viewpoints were arranged over the ancient rubble, turning the emperors' hill into a Renaissance pleasure garden. Today the gardens are a shaded, green counterpoint to the exposed stone everywhere else on the site, and a welcome place to pause in the heat. They are also a reminder that the Palatine's story did not stop with Rome's fall: popes and princes went on shaping the hill long after the last emperor left it.
The views, and giving the hill its due
The Palatine offers the best views on the whole site, and they are not incidental — the emperors chose the hill partly for exactly this command over the city. From its southern edge you look straight down into the Circus Maximus, the enormous chariot-racing track, and can picture the emperor watching the races from his own palace. From other points the Forum spreads out below and the Colosseum rises beyond. Many visitors, worn out after the amphitheatre and the Forum, give the Palatine a tired twenty minutes; it deserves far more. Come up here with some energy left, walk the palace ruins and the gardens, take in the views, and you understand something the Forum alone cannot show you — how it felt to look down on Rome as its master.