Rome historical timeline

Rome exists where it does because of a ford. The first villages sat on hills looking down on the only natural crossing of the Tiber in this stretch of the river, beside Tiber Island, and the city grew outwards from that one practical fact — seven hills above a river crossing, about 24 kilometres inland from the sea. Everything else followed: the hills became quarters, the crossing became bridges, the river became first the reason for the city and then its most destructive neighbour.

The footprint has moved twice as violently as the buildings suggest. An imperial city of perhaps a million people fell to around 30,000 after the Gothic War, leaving groups of inhabited buildings scattered among ruins, vegetation, vineyards and market gardens — and that ruined-farmland Rome is what the popes, and later the Kingdom of Italy, built the modern city on top of. The layers you walk past are not decoration. They are what happens when a city of a million shrinks to a village and then grows back.

Chronology

1. Mid-8th century B.C. Archaeological evidence puts the “birth” of the city here, as the separate hilltop villages between the sea and the Capitoline coalesce into one settlement.
2. 753 B.C. The traditional founding date, which the Roman annalists put at 21 April. It is a legend rather than a finding, and the deliberate-founding version of it remains a fringe hypothesis among archaeologists.
3. 509 B.C. The Romans expel their last king and establish an oligarchic republic led by two consuls elected annually — the institution that shaped the Forum you can still walk through.
4. 44 B.C. Caesar is assassinated, leading to the second Triumvirate and a final civil war between Octavian and Mark Antony.
5. 27 B.C. Octavian is named Augustus and princeps, founding the principate — a diarchy between the princeps and the senate.
6. 98 Frontinus, as curator aquarum, records nine aqueducts feeding 39 monumental fountains and 591 public basins, each major fountain connected to two aqueducts so one could be shut for service. Rome has had fountains for more than two thousand years without a break.
7. 2nd century onwards The first large-scale catacombs are cut through tuff outside the city, because Roman law forbade burial within the limits. At least forty are known, some found only in recent decades, and they hold pagan and Jewish burials as well as Christian ones.
8. 313 The Edict of Milan grants freedom of worship to everyone including Christians and orders confiscated church property restored — the legal turn that eventually made this a city of churches.
9. 410 The Visigoths under Alaric I sack Rome. Very little physical damage is done and most of it is repaired; the shock is political.
10. 455 Genseric, king of the Vandals, sacks the city. The population has already fallen from around 800,000 to somewhere between 450,000 and 500,000.
11. 476 Romulus Augustus is deposed on 4 September, ending the Western Roman Empire. He was residing at Ravenna, not here — the seat of government had moved in 408.
12. 537 The Gothic siege. Efforts to maintain the monumental centre, the Palatine and the imperial baths had continued until this point; afterwards the population drops to about 30,000.
13. 756 Pepin the Short, having defeated the Lombards, gives the pope temporal jurisdiction over the Duchy of Rome and the Exarchate of Ravenna, creating the Papal States.
14. 800 Charlemagne is crowned Emperor in Rome by Pope Leo III on Christmas night — the first time the city hosts both of the powers whose struggle defines its Middle Ages.
15. 1300 Boniface VIII calls the first Jubilee of Christianity, bringing pilgrims to Rome in numbers that set the pattern for every Holy Year since.
16. 1527 The Landsknechts of Emperor Charles V sack the city — the first plunder in more than five hundred years, and an abrupt end to the Renaissance golden age that had peaked under Julius II.
17. 1871 The capital of Italy moves from Florence to Rome. The city had 212,000 inhabitants in 1870, all of them inside the ancient walls; by 1920 it had 660,000.
18. 1943 On 19 July the San Lorenzo district is bombed, killing about 3,000 people and injuring 11,000. Mussolini is arrested on 25 July, and the Germans occupy the city on 8 September.
19. 1944 Rome is liberated on 4 June.

What the river did, and what was done to the river

The single largest change to what a visitor actually sees is not a monument but an embankment. The Campus Martius is a flood plain and flooded routinely to a depth of two metres; on 15 September 1557 the Tiber rose to 19 metres above sea level and more than a thousand people died. The river is now confined between high stone embankments begun in 1876, with the boulevards called lungoteveri running along the top of them.

That is why Rome turns its back on its river. The embankments ended the floods and simultaneously cut the city off from the water it was built beside — which is worth knowing when you cross Ponte Sisto or Ponte Sant'Angelo and find the Tiber sunk well below you between walls. Of the ancient bridges, Ponte Milvio and Ponte Sant'Angelo survive in part and the Pons Fabricius survives whole.