Palatine Hill Historical Timeline

A hill that was a village, then an address, then a palace, then a garden, then an excavation — and never once abandoned.

Chronology

1. 10th century B.C. — excavation shows people living on the hill. Structural impact: establishes the Palatine as the oldest inhabited ground in the city. What you see today: nothing above ground, but it is why every later layer is here rather than somewhere else.
2. 9th–7th century B.C. — a group of huts, believed to have been used for funerary purposes, occupies the hill; they were unearthed by excavations in 1907 and again in 1948. Structural impact: physical evidence contemporary with the traditional founding of Rome. What you see today: the cuttings in the tufa where the hut posts stood.
3. 509–44 B.C. — during the Republic the hill is where the leading families live. Structural impact: the Palatine becomes the most desirable address in Rome, which is precisely why the emperors later took it. What you see today: Republican-era houses beneath the later palaces, most of them overbuilt.
4. A.D. 64 — the Great Fire destroys Nero's Domus Transitoria. Structural impact: clears the ground for a far larger replacement. What you see today: the reason almost nothing pre-64 survives at palace level.
5. by A.D. 69 — Nero replaces it with the even larger Domus Aurea, over which Domitian's Palace is eventually built. Structural impact: the hill is committed permanently to imperial residence, at a scale that required engineering the slopes themselves. What you see today: the vaulted substructures, which are the bulk of what is standing.
6. 16th century — the Farnese family acquire the hill and lay out the Farnese Gardens. Structural impact: one of the earliest private botanical gardens in Europe is built directly on top of the Domus Tiberiana. What you see today: the gardens, still partially preserved, and the best view of the Forum from anywhere on the hill.
7. 16th century — the Villa Mattei is built at the top of the hill, between the Domus Flavia and the Domus Augustana. Structural impact: a further layer of private ownership over the palace remains. What you see today: the building that now houses the Palatine Museum.
8. ca 1830 — the villa is bought by the Scot Charles Mills, who turns it into an elaborate neo-Gothic villa; at the end of the nineteenth century it becomes a convent. Structural impact: the strangest layer on the hill — a Scottish gentleman's Gothic fantasy on the palace of the Caesars. What you see today: the surviving portion, partially demolished from 1928 to allow excavation, now the museum.
9. 18th–19th century — intensive archaeological excavation begins in the eighteenth century and culminates in the late nineteenth, after Rome is proclaimed capital of the Kingdom of Italy. Structural impact: the hill is stripped back from garden and villa to archaeology, and much of the post-antique fabric is removed. What you see today: the excavated hill itself, which is a nineteenth-century creation as much as an ancient one.
10. 2006 — archaeologists announce the discovery of the Palatine House, believed to be the birthplace of Augustus; unlike most Republican-era houses here it was apparently not overbuilt after the fire of A.D. 64, perhaps preserved deliberately. Structural impact: a Republican house surviving inside the imperial zone. What you see today: the continuing excavation, and a reason to look at what is not built over.
11. 2007 — a 16-metre-deep cavity with a vault encrusted with mosaics and seashells is found beneath the Domus Livia during restoration, and is claimed to be the legendary Lupercal cave. Structural impact: a genuine and spectacular discovery, with a contested identification. What you see today: not the cave, which is not on the visitor route — but the argument is worth knowing when you pass the Domus Livia.

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