Palatine Hill

Excavation shows the hill was lived on from the tenth century BC, and digs in 1907 and 1948 uncovered a group of huts thought to have served funerary purposes between the ninth and seventh centuries BC, around the period assigned to Rome's founding. The hill carried two summits: the higher was called the Palatium, the lower the Germalus.

Roman myth put the cave of the Lupercal here, where the she-wolf was said to have kept Romulus and Remus alive; the adult Romulus was said to have chosen this hill for his city and killed his brother on it, a murder Roman tradition tied to the origins of the pomerium. Livy derived the hill's name from Arcadian settlers of Pallantium, though other scholars proposed other roots for it. The Lupercalia was celebrated here: priests set out from the cave at the foot of the hill and circled it, striking those they passed in a rite of fertility.

Through the Republic (c. 509-44 BC) the hill held the houses of the Roman governing class. Cicero and his brother Quintus lived there, as did Mark Antony and the orator Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, whose house Augustus later bought. Remains of Republican houses have been found under the Domus Flavia, among them the frescoed Casa dei Grifi and Aula Isiaca.

The worship of the Magna Mater, Cybele, was brought from Asia Minor at the time of the Second Punic War, and Augustus founded sanctuaries of Apollo and Vesta at his own house.

Augustus, born on the hill, made it his residence, buying Hortensius's house and enlarging the property with neighbouring ones; from the beginning of the Empire in 27 BC the Palatine gradually became the emperors' preserve. Tiberius's Domus Tiberiana was enlarged by Caligula. The Great Fire of AD 64 destroyed Nero's Domus Transitoria, and by AD 69 he had replaced it with the larger Domus Aurea, over which Domitian's palace was later raised. The Severans added the Domus Severiana and the Septizodium.

By the end of the imperial age the hill was a single run of palaces and gardens for the emperors' use, and the word Palatium passed into European languages as the ordinary word for a palace.

Between 375 and 379 the remains of Saint Caesarius of Terracina were translated, with Pope Damasus I's assistance, into the Domus Augustana, where an oratory to the martyr, San Cesareo in Palatio, was raised. It was the first regularly constituted Christian place of worship on the Palatine, replacing the emperors' domestic lararium, and served as a palatine chapel where the portraits sent from Byzantium by newly elected emperors were displayed.

From the sixteenth century the hill belonged to the Farnese, bought by Alessandro Farnese, who had the Horti Palatini Farnesiorum laid out by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola; they survive in part above the remains of the Domus Tiberiana. Elisabetta Farnese, the family's last heir, married Philip V of Spain in 1714 and brought the gardens as dowry, passing them to the Bourbons of Naples; in 1861 the deposed Francis II of the Two Sicilies was obliged to sell them to Napoleon III.

Napoleon III put the excavations in Pietro Rosa's hands; his work included the temple of the Magna Mater, the Domus Tiberiana and the Domus Flavia. In 1870 Napoleon III sold the gardens to the Italian state for 650,000 lire, an operation carried through by Rosa and the politician Quintino Sella with the aim of creating a large archaeological park. Intensive excavation had begun in the eighteenth century and reached its height in the late nineteenth, after Rome was proclaimed capital of the Kingdom of Italy; the palace of Tiberius, beneath the Farnese gardens, remains entirely undug.

The Villa Mattei stood between the Domus Flavia and the Domus Augustana from the sixteenth century; the Scot Charles Mills bought it around 1830 and made it a neo-Gothic villa, and at the end of the nineteenth century it became a convent. From 1928 it was partly demolished to open the ground for excavation, and the Palatine Museum was installed in the surviving part, holding finds from the hill and from other ancient Italian sites; the hill itself is now largely an open-air museum. In 2006 archaeologists announced an aristocratic house on the slope overlooking the Colosseum, believed to be Augustus's birthplace, and in 2007 a decorated cavity found beneath the House of Livia during restoration was claimed as the Lupercal, an identification many reject on topographic and stylistic grounds, taking it for a nymphaeum or underground triclinium of Neronian date.