Palatine Hill

You can feel the argument in the Palatine Hill—an eternal Roman tug-of-war between private life and public power, between myth and masonry. This is the Palatine Hill (Italian: Palatino), the centremost of Rome’s seven hills, and the place Romans liked to call “the first nucleus of the Roman Empire.”

From myth to map

Before there were palaces, there were stories. Roman mythology places the cave called the Lupercal here, where Romulus and Remus were found by the she-wolf Lupa. And it’s not just origin—there’s the darker turn, too: the Palatine is also where the adult Romulus chose to found the city, and where he murdered Remus. That ritualistic murder fed directly into Roman identity, tied to the mythological beginnings of the Pomerium. Then comes the other mythic “conflict”: were Rome’s beginnings Greek or Roman? Pallantium—an ancient city near the Tiber river—hovers in the background. Roman writers link it to Evander of Pallene, credited with founding Pallantium’s line of ancestry before the Trojan War. Virgil’s Aeneid makes the connection especially famous. Dionysius of Halicarnassus says Romans traced the story to Greeks from Pallantium of Arcadia, about sixty years before the Trojan War, with Evander as leader.