Palatine Hill site features

The Palatine Hill is 25 hectares — 63 acres by the measure of the Forma Urbis — and that is the first thing to get straight. It is a district rather than a monument, raised above the Forum on one side and the Circus Maximus on the other, and it takes a morning rather than an hour.

Almost nothing up here is a building any more; it is the understorey of buildings. What you walk among are brick and concrete substructures — vaults, corridors, retaining walls and the stumps of piers — belonging to palaces whose floors have gone. The effect is of walking at the level that used to be the basement.

The two great palace blocks are still legible as plans. The Domus Flavia and the Domus Augustana occupy the top of the hill, and between them stands something later and smaller: the Villa Mattei, built in the sixteenth century. It was partially demolished from 1928 to let the excavations proceed, and the Palatine Museum is installed in the part that survived — so the museum is a cut-down Renaissance villa sitting in the middle of an imperial palace.

Over much of it there are gardens, and they are the reason the hill is green. From the sixteenth century the Palatine belonged to the Farnese, who laid out the Farnese Gardens; these are still partially preserved above the remains. Box, ilex and gravel walks sit directly on top of Roman masonry.

Two of the most talked-about spots are small and easy to miss. In 2006 archaeologists announced the Palatine House, believed to be the birthplace of Augustus; in 2007 the legendary Lupercal cave was claimed to have been found beneath the remains of the Domus Livia. Neither looks like anything much; both are the reason people come up here at all.

The oldest things on the hill are postholes. Excavations in 1907 and again in 1948 unearthed a collection of huts, and occupation of the area runs back to the tenth century BC — so the hill was lived on for roughly nine hundred years before any emperor built here.

Fire is written into the plan. The Great Fire of Rome in A.D. 64 destroyed Nero's Domus Transitoria, and by A.D. 69 it had been replaced by the even larger Domus Aurea. During the Republic, from 509 BC to 44 BC, this was simply where leading Romans had their residences.

And the name is older than the city's own account of itself. Livy has the hill named from Arcadian settlers from Pallantium, itself named from its founder Pallas, son of Lycaon.

What the hill gives you, finally, is the view down. Intensive excavation began in the eighteenth century and culminated in the late nineteenth, after Rome was proclaimed capital — which is why you look onto an excavated Forum from a terrace rather than across a field.

The Farnese Gardens

Laid out by the Farnese family from the sixteenth century over the Domus Tiberiana and still partially preserved — among the earliest botanical gardens in Europe. The terrace is the single best viewpoint on the hill: the whole Roman Forum, end to end, from above.

The Domus Flavia and Domus Augustana

The ceremonial and private halves of Domitian's palace, at the top of the hill, separated by the building that now holds the museum.

The substructures over the Domus Aurea

Nero's vast palace, completed by A.D. 69 after the Great Fire destroyed the Domus Transitoria, survives here as the ground Domitian built on.

The Iron Age huts

Excavated in 1907 and again in 1948, dated between the ninth and seventh centuries BC and thought to have been used for funerary purposes — the physical remains closest in date to the founding of the city.

The Palatine Museum

Installed in the surviving part of the Villa Mattei — a sixteenth-century villa turned neo-Gothic by a Scot around 1830, turned convent at the end of the nineteenth century, and partially demolished from 1928 to let the excavation proceed.

The House of Augustus and the Palatine House

The latter announced in 2006 and believed to be the emperor's birthplace, apparently spared the overbuilding that erased the other Republican houses after the fire of A.D. 64.