Colle Palatino, Rome

Colle Palatino opens before you as a broad archaeological landscape, a place where gardens, masonry, and excavated rooms overlap. It is among Rome’s seven historic hills and lies between the Forum and the Velabrum. Roman tradition places the city’s founding on this hill.

In that legend, the wolf sheltered Romulus and Remus at the Lupercal, and Romulus later selected this ground for his new city. The story has physical depth: excavations demonstrate habitation here from the tenth century before Christ. During the Republic, affluent Romans made homes on the slope.

Augustus then made the hill his residence, beginning a transformation that drew later emperors here; remains associated with Augustus, Tiberius, and Domitian still survive. The hill’s Latin name, Palatium, eventually gave European languages their everyday word for a palace. The surviving structures mingle with planted terraces.

The Farnese family created gardens here during the sixteenth century, above remains of the Domus Tiberiana. Today the hill functions largely as an open-air museum, while the Palatine Museum preserves finds unearthed here and elsewhere in ancient Italy.