Seven Hills of Rome

“ People talked of the Vatican being closed, and pictured a dark, gloomy palace, encompassed by high walls, whereas this palace overlooked all Rome, and the Pope from his window could see the world. Pierre himself had viewed the panorama from the summit of the Janiculum, the loggie of Raffaelle, and the dome of St. Peter’s, and so he well knew what it was that Leo XIII was able to behold. In the centre of the vast desert of the Campagna, bounded by the Sabine and Alban mountains, the seven illustrious hills appeared to him with their trees and edifices. ”

“ The two best points from which to view the exterior of Rome are the Pincian Hill and the Janiculum. Of the seven hills these are not the least interesting, and from their summits can be taken in its full magnificence a general view of the Eternal City. Once seen from these points it will never be forgotten, but will dwell in the mind forever. A glance reveals all the great features of the city, with its grand and impressive surroundings. ”

“ In this broad new thoroughfare there were only buildings of recent erection. Still, the wave of the cabman’s whip became more pronounced and his voice rose to a higher key, with a somewhat ironical inflection, when he gave the name of a huge and still chalky pile on his left, a gigantic erection of stone, overladen with sculptured work-pediments and statues.
* One of the seven hills on which Rome is built. The other six are the Capitoline, Aventine, Quirinal, Esquiline, Coelian, and Palatine. These names will perforce frequently occur in the present narrative. ”

“ THE TOWER OF THE CAPITOL,
whence a fine view of Rome and its environs can be enjoyed, standing, as it were, between ancient and medieval Rome. It is the best position for study in the world.
From this height the huge mass of the Colosseum appears elegant and light. The famous Seven Hills may be made out, notwithstanding the alteration in the soil: on the left is the Quirinal, beyond that the Viminal, and beyond that the Esquiline; to the extreme right is the Aventine; before us is the Palatine, with the Cœlian beyond it; whilst we occupy the Capitoline. ”

“ The first step Growth of early Rome. was the amalgamation of Roma Quadrata with the villages on the neighbouring spurs of the Esquiline and Caelian. This gave birth to the community of the Seven Hills, whose existence is proved by the survival of the festival known as the Septimontium, celebrated on the 11th of December (Fest. 340; Macrob. i. 16, 6) . The seven hills were not those familiar in later nomenclature, but the following:— (1) Palatium and (2) Cermalus, the two summits of the Palatine; (3) Velia, the saddle between the Palatine and Esquiline ”

“ Ancient Rome was built upon seven hills, which are now scarcely discoverable on account of the vast quantities of rubbish with which the valleys are filled. Pliny estimates the circumference of the city in his time at 13,000 paces (which nearly agrees with modern measurements) , and the popu [Pg 58] lation at 3,000,000. Rome was filled with magnificent public edifices, temples, theatres, amphitheatres, circuses, naumachiæ, porticos, basilicæ, baths, gardens, triumphal arches, columns, sewers, aqueducts, sepulchres, public and private palaces, etc. ”

“ Down the steep mountain they go, down over the rich, rolling land, down through the deep forests, unhewn of man, down at last to the river, where seven low hills rise out of the wide plain. One of those hills the leader chooses, rounded and grassy; there they encamp, and they dig a trench and build huts. Pales, protectress of flocks, gives her name to the Palatine Hill. Rumon, the flowing river, names the village Rome, and Rome names the leader Romulus, the Man of the River, the Man of the Village by the River ”

“ A meadow near the Tiber, of grass and daisies, tufted with yellow-hearted jonquils. Larks and sun and wind overhead; in the distance the pale mountains, patched with snow. All round, the pale green embosomings of the soft earth hills. If the Umbrians got their love of circular hill lines at home, they learned in Rome the real existence of the green grass valleys and hills unbroken by cultivation, like those behind Perugino's Crucifixion and Spagna's Muses. ”

“ Though swept, as the site of Rome now is, with the besom of destruction, the outlines, which no ruin can obliterate, are yet grand as ever. Immediately beneath you are the red roofs and glittering domes of the city; around is a gay fringe of vineyards and gardens; and beyond is the dark bosom of the Campagna, stretching far and wide, meeting the horizon on the west and south, and confined on the east and north by a wall of glorious hills,—the sweet Volscians, the blue Sabines, the craggy Apennines, with their summits—at least when I saw them—hoary with the snows of winter. ”

“ The Campagna is still the Campagna; the Alban Hills are still classic ground, and Tivoli and Frascati—in spite of the modernisms which have, here and there, crept in—are still the romantic Tivoli and Frascati of the ages long gone by.
The surrounding hills of Rome are, really, what give it its charm. The city is strong in contrast from every aspect, modernity nudging and crowding antiquity. Rome itself is not lovely, only superbly and majestically overpowering in its complexity. ”

“ At a later time, when Rome was united under one government, the very physical peculiarities which had originally made its hills so populous, through their natural adaptability for defence, became extremely inconvenient in a united city, where architectural symmetry and splendour were above all things aimed at. Hence the most gigantic engineering works were undertaken: tops of hills were levelled, whole ridges cut away, and gentle slopes formed in the place of abrupt cliffs. The levelling of the Velia and the excavation of the site for Trajan’s forum are instances of this. ”

“ In the morning world below lay far and wide the great, still Rome,—no living city, a solitary, enormous, enchanted garden of the old, hidden, heroic spirits, laid out on twelve hills. The unpeopled pleasure-garden of spirits announced itself by its green meadows and cypresses between palaces, and by its broad, open stairways and columns and bridges, by its ruins and high fountains and garden of Adonis, and its green mountains and temples of the gods ”

“ It is true that the natural features of the scene are unaltered. The long wall of blue Sabine mountains, with Soracte in the distance, closed in the Campagna, which stretched far across to the sea and round the base of the Alban hills. But ancient Rome was not, like modern Rome, impressive from its solitude, standing alone, with its one conspicuous cupola, in the midst of a desolate though beautiful waste. ”

“ But near Rome, looking towards the soft green outline of the Alban Hills, all that seems illusion; this is reality, this empty space, untroubled by past or future, this sweep of dun gold and fading purple; its surrounding hills that all look towards Rome have seen the place unpeopled, seen it swarming with life; have seen it flaring with pomp and then submerged in blood; now they are guardians of that which modern cataclysms have failed to rend—the peace of a place whence even the memory of humanity is banished and Nature smiles and broods alone over her lovely handiwork. ”

“ For Rome is not an Urban City; and underneath all the Bernini palaces, we must imagine things like Palazzo Capranica, with the few mullioned and Gothic windows picked in its fortress-like walls. How I seem to feel what Rome is made of—its strange living components in the past!
At Subiaco the streets were strewn, as for a procession, with shredded petals of violets. All kinds of violets grow on those hills, some reddish and as big as pansies; and as we swished past, instead of the dry scent of myrrh and mint of our Tuscan hills, there came a moist smell of violets from the hedgerows. ”

“ The Middle Ages walked over these entombed streets and temples and suspected nothing. But all towns are built on their dead past, for earth’s crust renews itself as incessantly as our own skin. We walk over our ancestors. There are twenty-seven layers of human life at Rome.
It needs no earth-convulsions, no miracles of lava. One generation of cities succeeds another. Nature, a pious Andromache, covers up their remains as softly as the snow falls or the grass grows. ”

“ The exterior is disappointing, and many and many a visit must be paid to the interior before wonderment reaches admiration. Just as it is possible to gain the best impression of the power of ancient Rome outside Rome itself, so does one grasp the size of the mighty fabric only when some miles away in the country beyond the walls. Climb the lower slopes of the hills near Tivoli or Frascati, and what does one see? Apparently a level plain, out of which rises far away a marvellous dome. ”

“ The view of Rome from these gardens is superb: though the sky was clouded, the atmosphere was perfectly pure and clear: the eye took in the whole extent of ancient and [Pg 127] modern Rome; beyond it the Campagna, the Alban Hills, and the Apennines, which appeared of a deep purple, with pale clouds floating over their summits. The city lay at our feet, silent, and clothed with the daylight as with a garment—no smoke, no vapour, no sound, no motion, no sign of life: it looked like a city whose inhabitants had been suddenly petrified, or smitten by a destroying angel ”

“ Not a trace remains above ground. Even the broken pottery, that infallible indicator of bygone civilisation, which marks the site and determines the limits of habitation on many a now desolate spot of classic ground, is here so overgrown with herbage that the eye of an antiquary would alone detect it. It is a site strong by nature, and well adapted for a city, as cities then were; for it is scarcely larger than the Palatine Hill, which, though at first it embraced the whole of Rome, was afterwards too small for a single palace. ”

“ How stunted are the trees (all except the weeds) here! how flowerless the hedges! how empty of life, grace, detail the country!
I remember the sort of rapture of the first acquaintance with Tuscan valleys, hills, woods, fields, and all the lovely fulness of dainty real detail.
Rome, as I said before, is all theatre scenes; marvellous coup d'œils, into which, advancing (from the Capitol) from opposite the Palatine palms, from the Lateran steps, from the Tiber quays, you find nothing to go on with ”

“ I need not dwell on the magnificence of that truly imperial plain, to which nature has given, in a country of hills, dimensions so goodly. From the foot of the Apennines it runs on [Pg 278] and on for upwards of an hundred miles, till it meets the Neapolitan frontier at Terracina. Its breadth from the Volscian hills to the sea cannot be less than forty miles. Towards the head of this great plain lies Rome, than which a finer site for the capital of a great empire could nowhere have been found. By nature it is most fertile; its climate is delicious. ”

“ On the crest, under the thin fringe of bare trees, with the plain of Rome, the snow of the Apennines on one side, the violet woods of Monte Laziale on the other, the surprise of suddenly coming on a rude stone cottage, with headless statues of athletes and togaed Romans built into its rough walls. And in a hollow under delicate leafless chestnuts that wonderful little theatre, cut out of black volcanic stone, as if the representation were to be storm and full moon, making and unmaking of mountains and countries, and the whole of history.... ”

“ Beyond this scene stretches to the faint far-off horizon the desert Campagna; a dim, misty, homeless land, where the moan of the wind sounds ever like the voice of the past, and the pathos of a vanished people breathes over all the scene; with here and there a gray nameless ruin, a desolate bluff, or a grassy mound, marking the site of some mysterious Etruscan or Sabine city that had perished ages before Romulus had laid the foundations of Rome. ”

“ Rome commences at a point—Piazza del Popolo—and spreads out southwards like a fan, the western extremity being occupied by the Vatican, and the eastern by the Lateran; both these head-quarters of the Papacy are isolated from the rest of the city. Modern Rome occupies the valley of the Campus Martius, which was outside ancient Rome, and the hills that abut it. Rome is divided into two unequal parts by the river Tiber, which enters the line of the walls, with the Popolo on its left. For a short distance it flows southwards; then it makes a great bend to the west ”

“ Finally, after Rome had become the capital of united Italy, in the last quarter of the 19th century, an extensive government plan (piano regulatore) was gradually carried out, with the object of reducing hills and valley to a uniform level and constructing wide boulevards on the chessboard method of a modern American city. The constant fires which have at times devastated Rome have been a powerful agent in obliterating the natural contour of the ground; and the accumulated rubbish from this and other causes has in some places overlaid the ground to a depth of 40 ft., notably in the valleys. ”

“ In those last years of the fifteenth century, Rome was a city of the Middle Ages. The cupola of the Pantheon, the circular hulk of the Colosseum, and the twin columns of Trajan and Antoninus projected, like the fantastic antiquities of some fresco of Benozzo Gozzoli, above domeless church roofs, battlemented palace walls, and innumerable Gothic belfries and feudal towers. In the theatre of Marcellus rose the fortress of the Orsinis; against the tower whence Nero, as the legend ran, had watched the city burning, were clustered the fortifications of the Colonnas ”