Where does the word palace come from?

A Word Born on a Hill

The Palatine is the centermost of Rome's seven hills and one of the oldest parts of the city. Excavations show people living here from the tenth century BC, and huts found in 1907 and 1948 date from the centuries when the city was founded. Historians have called it the first nucleus of the Roman Empire, long before any emperor set foot on its slopes.

When Augustus made his home here around 27 BC, the hill became the preserve of the emperors. Its name, Palatium, passed into Latin as the word for an imperial residence, then into Italian as palazzo and into English as palace. Every palace in the world, in that sense, carries a trace of this one Roman hill.

Today the whole hilltop is an open-air museum of ruins, pines and gardens. It rises straight from the Roman Forum on one side and falls to the Circus Maximus on the other, and it belongs to the same archaeological park as the Forum and the Colosseum, with views down over both from its paths.

The Hill of Romulus

In Roman myth the Palatine held the Lupercal, the cave where a she-wolf fed the twin infants Romulus and Remus. It was here that the grown Romulus chose to found his city, and here that he killed his brother in the quarrel that followed. The cave belongs to the hill's legend rather than to anything a visitor can see today.

Another legend tells how Hercules struck the monster Cacus so hard that his club split open the southeast corner of the hill. A stair that later climbed that corner carried Cacus's name, a small reminder that the Romans wove their landscape into their myths at every turn, long before any archaeologist climbed the hill with a trowel.

The Romans took their own beginnings seriously. In Augustus's own reign, a kind of archaeological dig on the hill turned up Bronze Age pottery and tools, and he declared the spot the original town of Rome. Modern excavators have since confirmed a Bronze Age settlement older than the traditional founding date.

The hill once had two summits with a hollow between them, the higher called Palatium and the lower Germalus, and the ancient city plan known as the Forma Urbis gives it a circuit enclosing about sixty-three acres. In 2006 archaeologists announced the discovery beneath the hill of a very ancient aristocratic house, believed to be the birthplace of Augustus, Rome's first emperor.

The Emperors Move In

Under the Republic the Palatine was simply a neighborhood of the wealthy, its slopes dotted with private houses. From 27 BC Augustus built his own house here, and alongside it a temple to Apollo. Gradually the whole hill became the exclusive domain of emperors, closed to the ordinary citizens who had once lived beside them.

The ruins of at least three imperial palaces survive here, belonging to Augustus, Tiberius and Domitian. The House of Livia, Augustus's wife, is known for its frescoes, though the attribution rests on slim evidence: a name on a lead pipe and the house's closeness to that of Augustus, nothing more certain than that.

The Domus Tiberiana, the house of Tiberius, was later absorbed into the first palace built here by Nero. After the Great Fire of AD 64 destroyed that building, Nero replaced it with the far larger Domus Aurea, a palace whose scale became legendary in its own time and whose name still stands for extravagance.

Palatium Becomes Palace

Dominating the hilltop now is the Palace of Domitian, built largely in his reign over the earlier buildings of Nero. It has a public wing, the Domus Flavia, where the emperor received visitors, and a private one, the Domus Augustana, where he lived. Inside lies the Palatine stadium, a long sunken court shaped like a racetrack.

Later emperors kept adding to the complex, above all the Severan family, whose Domus Severiana reaches out over the southern slope toward the Circus Maximus. By the later empire the hill was less a neighborhood than a single, continuously expanded imperial residence, each ruler layering his own rooms over his predecessor's.

It is this later, grander sense of Palatium, a sprawling residence of marble halls and gardens rather than just a hill, that passed down into Latin usage and from Latin into the Romance languages and English alike. The word palace still carries an echo of these ruins overhead, whatever grand building it is used for today.

Gardens and a Vanished Villa

From the sixteenth century the Farnese family owned the Palatine, and their gardens, the Orti Farnesiani, still partly survive above the remains of the house of Tiberius. Their terraces look down over the Roman Forum, giving one of the best overviews of the ancient city center available anywhere on the hill.

At the top of the hill, between the two wings of Domitian's palace, a sixteenth-century villa stood until it was bought around 1830 by a Scot, Charles Mills, who turned it into an elaborate neo-Gothic house, with pointed windows and battlements set among ancient Roman masonry.

The villa became a convent at the end of the nineteenth century and was partly demolished from 1928 to make way for excavation. The Palatine Museum now occupies what remains of the building, holding finds unearthed across the digs on the hill, from Bronze Age pottery to imperial-era sculpture found over a century of excavation.

The Circus Maximus Below

Below the southern side of the hill, in the valley between the Palatine and the Aventine, lies the Circus Maximus, the first and largest stadium of ancient Rome. It was a chariot-racing track roughly two thousand and thirty-seven feet long and three hundred eighty-seven feet wide, and it could hold over one hundred fifty thousand spectators. Roman tradition traced its first games to the last kings, the Tarquins.

Races, beast hunts, athletic contests and gladiator fights were all held here during the great public games of the Roman calendar. The last known beast hunt took place in 523, and the last known races in 549, marking the end of a tradition that had run for roughly a thousand years.

Augustus set up Rome's first obelisk on the Circus's central barrier, brought from Egypt; it now stands in Piazza del Popolo. The site is a public park today, an open oval of grass where the shape of the ancient track is still easy to read from the hill above, long after the chariots stopped running.

How to Visit

The Palatine is entered on the same ticket system as the Forum and the Colosseum, bought through the archaeological park's official ticketing site; the booking ahead page explains how the combined ticket works and what to check before setting out. Most visitors climb up from the Forum and cross the hill on foot.

The hill together with the Forum deserves a long morning; the Palatine itself is greener and quieter, with shade under its pines. Paths climb and descend across much of the hilltop, and the ground is often ancient paving or loose gravel, so visitors should wear sturdy, comfortable shoes rather than anything delicate.

The Circus Maximus below needs no ticket, since it is simply a public park. Visitors arriving by public transit should check current routes with ATAC, since schedules and station access can change and are best confirmed directly before setting out. Comfortable footwear serves well here too, since the paths around the site are uneven in places.