Palatine Hill: Where Rome Says It Was Born

The Palatine is the centremost of Rome's seven hills, and from its terraces you can look down over the Roman Forum on one side and the long green hollow of the Circus Maximus on the other. It is also the hill where Rome says it began. Most founding myths float somewhere safely offstage. The Palatine is unusual because here the legend and the ground almost touch, and because the hill gave a word to half the languages of Europe.

The myth on the hill

Legend places on this hill the Lupercal, the cave where a she-wolf was said to have suckled the abandoned twins Romulus and Remus. And it was here, tradition holds, that Romulus went on to found the city, in the year 753 BC. That date is the one every Roman schoolchild learned, the official birthday of Rome, and it is pinned to this specific hilltop rather than to the valley or the river.

Where the myth and the spade almost meet

What makes the Palatine remarkable is that the archaeology does not simply contradict the story. Excavations in 1907, and again in 1948, uncovered Iron Age huts on this hilltop, simple dwellings that were in use from roughly the ninth to the seventh century BC. That window overlaps with the traditional founding date. So the myth of Romulus and the physical evidence of Rome's earliest settlement sit almost directly on top of each other, on the same ground. It does not prove the legend, and it is not meant to. But it is a rare and striking case of a founding story and the oldest layer of a real city occupying the same address.

One modern claim deserves caution. A cavity found beneath the hill and announced in 2007 as the actual Lupercal cave has never been confirmed and remains disputed. Hold it as a contested idea, not a fact. The honest version of the Palatine is powerful enough without it: the huts are real, the dating is real, and the overlap with the legend is real.

The hill that named every palace

Now walk forward a few centuries. The emperor Augustus began building imperial residences on this very hill, and the emperor Domitian, who reigned from the year 81 to 96, vastly expanded them into a sprawling palace complex whose brick substructures still stand over the Circus Maximus. For centuries the Palatine was where Rome's rulers lived, and that is where a piece of everyday language comes from. The name of this hill, the Palatine, is the origin of the word palace, carried down through language after language across Europe. Every palace in the world is named, at one remove, after this ground. It is one of the quiet payoffs of the whole ancient core: a hill so associated with imperial living that its name became the generic word for a grand residence.

Reading it on the ground

Climb to the edge of a terrace and use the two views deliberately. Look down at the Forum and you are looking at the public Rome, the square where the city argued and traded. Turn to the Circus Maximus and you are looking at the space of mass spectacle, the chariot track. Between them, on the height, sat the private world of the men who ran it all. The Palatine is where public Rome, popular Rome and imperial Rome are all visible from one spot.

The hill is inside the paid archaeological park it shares with the Colosseum and the Forum on a single combined ticket, and reaching the terraces involves a real climb on uneven ground, so wear proper shoes and take the ascent slowly. There is little shade on top, so carry water and sun protection.

The Palatine is the turning point of a walk that follows the spine of ancient Rome from the arena to the capitol. Read how the Roman Forum worked as a public square just below it, browse the full set of Rome walking tours, or plan a day in Rome around the ancient core. Stand on the hill knowing what is under it, and it stops being a viewpoint and becomes the address where a city and its legend share a foundation.

Sources

• Palatine Hill, Wikipedia. The hill as the traditional site of Rome's founding, the Lupercal legend of Romulus and Remus, and the location of the imperial residences.
• Iron Age huts on the Palatine, encyclopedic reference. The 1907 and 1948 excavations and the ninth-to-seventh-century BC dating of the earliest dwellings.
• Etymology of "palace", encyclopedic reference. The derivation of the word palace from the Palatine Hill across European languages.
• 2007 reported Lupercal cavity, Wikipedia. Cited as a disputed and unconfirmed claim.
• Roamer tour transcript, "Colosseum and the Forum" (rome-colosseum-forum), fact-audited stop 4.