Capitoline Hill

• 1. Introduction

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  Capitoline Hill stands at the center of a story that stretches from the earliest days of Rome to a 20th-century dictator completing a Renaissance design. It is one of the Seven Hills of Rome, wedged between the Forum and the Campus Martius, and for more than two and a half thousand years it has served as the geographical and ceremonial heart of one of history's most consequential cities. The hill carried an earlier name before it became famous: Mons Saturnius, dedicated to the god Saturn. Its more familiar name grew from the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus built on its summit, and that name then stretched outward to cover the whole hill, and eventually other temples of Jupiter across the Roman world. There is an old tale, almost certainly invented, that when workers were digging the foundations of Jupiter's temple, they unearthed a man's severed head. In Latin, the word for head is caput, and from that gruesome legend some ancient sources derived the hill's name. Whether the story is true or not, it says something about how Romans thought about this place. The Capitolium was regarded as indestructible. Romans adopted it as a symbol of eternity. And the word itself outlived the empire, traveling through the centuries to become the English word capitol and lending its name, by widely accepted assumption, to Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

• 2. Treachery and Geese

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  A Roman maiden named Tarpeia was the first person the hill made famous, and she became famous for betrayal. When the Sabines crept toward the citadel atop Capitoline Hill, Tarpeia let them in. Her punishment was swift and permanent: she was flung from a steep cliff overlooking the Roman Forum, the first person to die that way at that spot. The cliff took her name afterward, becoming the Tarpeian Rock, and it went on to serve as a regular execution site for criminals and traitors. The Sabines who entered the city after the Rape of the Sabine Women eventually settled on the Capitoline themselves, becoming part of the Roman community they had once attacked. Lower on the hill's eastern slopes, an 8th-century BC sacred precinct called the Vulcanal, a shrine to Vulcan, occupied much of the ground that would later become the Roman Forum. Rome's fifth king, Tarquinius Priscus, who ruled from 616 to 579 BC, ordered a great temple to the Capitoline Triad built at the summit. His successor, the seventh and last king Tarquinius Superbus, who reigned until 496 BC, saw it completed. Ancient accounts called it one of the largest and most beautiful temples in the city, though little of it survives now. The Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus, built in 509 BC, was nearly as large as the Parthenon. When the Senones Gauls raided Rome in 390 BC, after defeating Roman forces at the battle of River Allia, the Capitoline was the only section of the city to resist capture. According to legend, the sacred geese of Juno, kept on the hill, alerted a Roman defender named Marcus Manlius Capitolinus to the Gallic attack in the night.

• 3. Caesar, Fire, and Records

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  Julius Caesar's complicated relationship with the Capitoline Hill illustrated how charged the site had become by the late Republic. During his triumph, Caesar suffered an accident that Roman observers read as a clear sign of Jupiter's anger at his role in the Civil Wars. Caesar responded by climbing to the temple on his knees, an act of public penance meant to avert the omen. Six months later, he was murdered, and his assassins, including Brutus, locked themselves inside the temple after the killing. During the Year of Four Emperors in 69 AD, Vespasian's brother and nephew were besieged inside that same temple, and in the course of that conflict, the building was destroyed by fire. Beneath the hilltop, a structure built in the first century BC housed something less dramatic but arguably more important: the archives of the Roman state. This was the Tabularium, built underground beneath what would eventually become the main piazza. It looked out from its rear onto the Roman Forum, and its most notable feature, apart from the building itself, was the Temple of Veiovis housed within it. By the time of the Renaissance, the hill that had once been the ceremonial center of the ancient world had become something far less impressive: a disorganized cluster of dilapidated buildings, occasionally used for the execution of criminals.

• 4. Medieval Resistance

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  In 1144, the citizens of Rome revolted against the authority of the Pope and the nobility, and the political fallout reshaped the Capitoline physically. A senator took up official residence on the hill as a result of that revolt, and his new palazzo deliberately turned its back on the ancient Roman Forum, starting a reorientation of the hill's civic axis that would only grow more pronounced later. A small piazza was laid out in front of the senator's building for communal use. By the middle of the 14th century, a guilds' court of justice had been built at the southern end of that piazza, and by the 15th century, the conservatori had taken it over. The piazza was already ringed by buildings before the 16th century began. The church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli sits adjacent to the square, near where the ancient arx or citadel once stood; at its base, the remains of a Roman insula survive, with more than four storeys visible from the street. The medieval period also witnessed more theatrical moments on the hill: Cola di Rienzo staged the dramatic scenes of his short-lived revived republic from the Capitoline, a direct echo of the hill's ancient role as a site of civic power and popular resistance. A monument to di Rienzo, installed in 1886, still stands on the grassy incline to the northwest of the cordonata.

• 5. Michelangelo's Commission

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  Michelangelo Buonarroti received the commission to redesign the Capitoline in 1536, at the height of his fame, from Pope Paul III of the Farnese family. Paul wanted a symbol of the new Rome capable of impressing Emperor Charles V, whose visit was expected in 1538. Michelangelo's first designs for the piazza and the surrounding palazzi date from that same year. His plan was formidably extensive. He chose to accentuate the medieval reversal of the hill's classical orientation, deliberately turning the civic center away from the Roman Forum and pointing it instead toward the direction of Papal Rome and St. Peter's Basilica. His historian Charles de Tolnay described the center of the paving design as evoking the exposed top of a gigantic egg buried at the center of the city at the center of the world. The entire hilltop is referred to in Latin as Caput mundi, meaning head of the world. An equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which the commission required him to incorporate, was to stand at the center of the piazza within an oval paved field. Michelangelo was charged with bringing order to a sloping, irregular hilltop already burdened by two crumbling medieval buildings set at an acute angle to one another. Executing the design proved slow. When Charles V arrived, the cordonata was not yet in place, and the imperial party had to scramble up the slope from the Forum to inspect the works in progress. Most of what Michelangelo designed was completed in the 17th century, after his death. The paving design, however, was not finished until three centuries after his plans were drawn, when Benito Mussolini ordered it completed to Michelangelo's original design in 1940.

• 6. The Piazza and the Cordonata

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  Étienne Dupérac's engraving of the piazza from a bird's-eye view captures Michelangelo's solution to a genuinely difficult spatial problem. The two existing medieval buildings did not face each other squarely, and the whole site sloped. Michelangelo answered with a trapezoidal space defined by three remodeled palazzi, approached from below by a wide ramped stair called the cordonata. The cordonata was built wide enough for horse riders to ascend without dismounting. At its base stand two Egyptian lions in black basalt; at its top, marble statues of Castor and Pollux. The paving within the piazza features a twelve-pointed interlaced star as a subtle reference to the constellations, and the travertine design is precisely level across the whole oval: low steps rise and fall around its perimeter to compensate for the slope beneath. The cordonata, the piazza, and the central palazzo together represent the first urban introduction of what would be called the cult of the axis, a design principle that spread to Italian garden plans and eventually reached its fullest expression in France. Michelangelo gave the Palazzo del Senatore a central campanile, a renovated facade, and a grand divided external staircase. He designed a new facade for the colonnaded Palazzo dei Conservatori and projected an identical structure, the Palazzo Nuovo, for the opposite side of the piazza. The three palazzi that now enclose the space are home to the Capitoline Museums.

• 7. The Buildings and Their Histories

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  The Palazzo dei Conservatori takes its name from the local magistrates who once used it, and it was built in the Middle Ages over a sixth-century BC temple dedicated to Jupiter. Michelangelo's renovation of it introduced the first use of a giant order spanning two storeys in Rome: a range of Corinthian pilasters with subsidiary Ionic columns flanking the ground-floor loggia openings and second-floor windows. The construction of both the Palazzo dei Conservatori and the Palazzo Nuovo was carried out after Michelangelo's death under the supervision of Tommaso dei Cavalieri. Adjacent to the Palazzo dei Conservatori is the Palazzo Caffarelli Clementino, built between 1576 and 1583 by Gregory Canonico for Gian Pietro Caffarelli II. Its construction required destroying what remained of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Until the end of World War I, the palazzo served as the German Embassy to Rome; after the war, the Comune di Roma claimed it and demolished a large section of its east wing to create the Caffarelli Terrace. The Palazzo Senatorio, built during the 13th and 14th centuries, stands on top of the ancient Tabularium and today houses the Roman city hall. Its bell tower was designed by Martino Longhi the Elder and built between 1578 and 1582. The current facade was built by Giacomo della Porta and Girolamo Rainaldi. The Palazzo Nuovo, the youngest of the three, was constructed in 1603, finished in 1654, and opened to the public in 1734; its facade duplicates Michelangelo's design for the Palazzo dei Conservatori exactly. The equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius at the center of the piazza, once mistakenly believed to depict Constantine the first Christian emperor, is now a modern copy; the bronze original is kept in the Palazzo dei Conservatori nearby.