Palatine Hill

What is there today

Domitian’s palace. The ruins that dominate the hill are the Palace of Domitian, built as the emperor’s official residence in 81–87 and used by the emperors after him; not all of it can be seen, as parts lie under later buildings (en.wikipedia). Its modern names divide it into three. The Domus Flavia, completed in 92 and attributed to the architect Rabirius, held the great public rooms for official business and ceremony (en.wikipedia), among them the Aula Regia, the audience hall (en.wikipedia). The Domus Augustana beside it was the private, residential part (en.wikipedia; it.wikipedia), and large stretches of the palace’s brick walls still stand (de.wikipedia); its tall arcades face the Circus Maximus below. The third part is the so-called stadium, a long sunken enclosure on the hill’s south-east side. Pleiades calls the name probably a misnomer: it may have been an elaborate porticoed garden, and it was restored under Hadrian and Septimius Severus. Below the stadium’s exedra are the remains of baths, and at the corner of the hill stand the brick substructures with which Septimius Severus extended the palace when the emperors had run out of space (en.wikipedia, Domus Severiana). Beneath the Domus Flavia lie houses of the Republic that the palace buried: the Casa dei Grifi, named after a stucco lunette with griffins, is one of the best-preserved Republican houses in Rome (it.wikipedia; fr.wikipedia), and the frescoes of the underground Aula Isiaca, which cannot be visited, have been moved to a room next to the Loggia Mattei, where they can be seen from the loggia (it.wikipedia).

The Augustan houses and temples, on the south-west corner. A house here has long been identified as Augustus’s own, though the identification is disputed and more recent scholarship has tended to doubt it (en.wikipedia). Two of its rooms keep wall paintings from 30 BC, among them the Room of the Masks, with painted architecture and theatrical masks, and a restoration completed in 2008 opened the house to the public (en.wikipedia). The neighbouring House of Livia owes its name to a lead pipe bearing the name Iulia Aug(usta) and to its closeness to Augustus’s house; its oldest parts date to 75–50 BC, and it may have been an apartment for Livia within her husband’s house (it.wikipedia; en.wikipedia). It is known for its frescoes (en.wikipedia). Next to Augustus’s house stood the Temple of Apollo Palatinus, dedicated in 28 BC (de.wikipedia; en.wikipedia); it has been excavated and partly restored since the 1860s, but only partial remains survive (en.wikipedia). At the western edge is the site of the Temple of Magna Mater, dedicated in 191 BC and restored by Augustus (Pleiades), with a small shrine beside it, possibly the Temple of Juno Sospita, whose remains are mostly a Hadrianic restoration (en.wikipedia).

Rome’s beginnings. The same corner holds the traces of the city’s legend. In 1872 excavators found the postholes of an archaic hut at the spot ancient writers gave for the Casa Romuli, the hut of Romulus, and historians generally identify them with it (de.wikipedia). In 2007 a cavity 16 m underground, decorated with shells and marble, was found and claimed as the Lupercal, the cave of the she-wolf; others think it is a Neronian nymphaeum, and it was measured with endoscopes and lasers for fear that digging would damage it further (de.wikipedia; en.wikipedia). Whether the Murus Romuli, the wall said to have ringed the hill in the 8th century BC, existed at all remains hotly debated (Pleiades).

The north side: Farnese Gardens and the Domus Tiberiana. From the 16th century the Farnese family owned the hill and laid out gardens, designed by Vignola, which are partly preserved (it.wikipedia). They sit on top of the Domus Tiberiana, the palace that takes its name from Tiberius, of which mainly retaining walls and lower storeys can be seen; most of it has never been excavated (de.wikipedia; it.wikipedia; en.wikipedia).

The Palatine Museum. In the surviving part of the Villa Mills on the summit, later a convent, the museum shows only finds from the hill (en.wikipedia; it.wikipedia): the ground floor runs from the first huts to the Republic, the first floor covers the imperial age, with paintings from Nero’s first palace, the Domus Transitoria, portraits of emperors, and the Alexamenos graffito, a 3rd-century drawing mocking a Christian, found in the Paedagogium below the palace in 1857 (en.wikipedia).