Palatine Hill

Tradition holds that Rome was founded right here, on the Palatine, on 21 April 753 BC, when Romulus — after killing his twin brother Remus in a dispute over which hill should host the new city — ploughed the sacred boundary (pomerium) around its summit. It's legend, not verifiable history, but it shows the Romans themselves considered the Palatine the birthplace of their city: every version of the founding myth, from Livy's account to the she-wolf suckling the twins in the nearby Lupercal cave, is anchored to this specific hill.

Whatever the truth of Romulus, the hill's real transformation began with Augustus, who built his house here to align himself with the mythical founder, and reached its most spectacular scale under Domitian at the end of the 1st century AD. His architect, Rabirius, raised two vast connected complexes: the Domus Flavia, for state ceremonies and audiences, and the Domus Augustana, the emperor's private residence, complete with a sunken garden shaped like a miniature stadium. Because emperors kept living and ruling from here for centuries, the hill's Latin name, Palatium, passed directly into English, Italian, French and Spanish as the word for "palace."

In the 1940s, archaeologists excavating the southwest corner of the hill uncovered a row of postholes cut straight into the bedrock — the foundations of Iron Age wattle-and-daub huts dating to the 9th-8th century BC, right around the traditional founding date. Ancient Romans already knew about a hut-shaped shrine on this spot, which they called the "Casa Romuli" and carefully maintained and rebuilt for centuries as a sacred relic of their founder. It's one of the rare cases where archaeology and legend point to exactly the same patch of ground, even if no one can prove Romulus himself ever lived there.

Centuries later, in 1550, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese bought up part of the ruined imperial palace on the northern slope and had it turned into a lavish terraced garden, designed by the architect Vignola. The Orti Farnesiani are generally considered the first private botanical garden in Europe, built directly over the vaulted substructures of the emperors' palaces — a Renaissance pleasure garden literally growing out of antiquity.