Seven hills of Rome

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The seven hills of Rome rise east of the river Tiber, forming the ancient core of the city inside its old walls. Tradition ties their story to one legendary date, the 21st of April 753 BC, when Romulus and Remus founded a city on the Palatine Hill. Each hill carries its own Latin name and Italian name, inherited from languages spoken long before the city had walls.

  Not every rise near Rome makes this list. Some hills close to the Tiber are deliberately excluded, and a separate, older set of seven peaks belonged to a different festival. Centuries later, a very different kind of text would borrow their number for its own purposes, and novelists are still choosing these same slopes as settings today. What actually separates a counted hill from an excluded one, and why do these seven summits keep resurfacing far from Rome?

• 2. Which Hills Count

  ›

  The Aventine Hill, known in Latin as Collis Aventinus and in Italian as Aventino, anchors one end of the traditional seven. Next comes the Caelian Hill, called Collis Caelius though it began as the Mons Querquetulanus, known today as Celio. The Capitoline Hill goes by Mons Capitolinus in Latin and Campidoglio in Italian. The Esquiline Hill, or Collis Esquilinus, is known in Italian as Esquilino. The Palatine Hill carries the names Collis Palatinus or Mons Palatinus in Latin, and Palatino in Italian. The Quirinal Hill, Collis Quirinalis in Latin, appears in Italian as Quirinale. The Viminal Hill rounds out the seven, called Collis Viminalis in Latin and Viminale in Italian.

  The Vatican Hill, or Collis Vaticanus, sits northwest of the Tiber and never joins this traditional list. The Pincian Hill lies to the north, and the Janiculan Hill, called Janiculum, sits to the west. The Sacred Mount, known as Mons Sacer, rises to the northeast. None of these four hills falls inside the boundary marked by the Servian Wall and the pomerium, the line that defined Rome's most ancient core.

  A separate list of seven names belongs to a different festival entirely, one with its own communities and its own peaks.

• 3. The Older Seven

  ›

  The Septimontium festival brought together residents of seven communities long before Rome had a single connecting wall. Its seven names were Oppius, Palatium, Velia, Fagutal, Cermalus, Caelius, and Cispius, each tied to a hill or peak of early Rome. This list is sometimes confused with the traditional seven hills, even though the two sets don't fully match.

  Three of those names, Cispius, Oppius, and Fagutal, were spurs jutting out from the larger Esquiline Hill. Palatium and Cermalus marked two separate peaks of the Palatine Hill itself. The Velian Hill formed a ridge joining the Palatine to the Oppian, and Caelius rounded out the group as the seventh.

  These scattered peaks and ridges would eventually need draining and joining before anything resembling one city could take shape.

• 4. From Marsh to Metropolis

  ›

  Latin speakers called their reclaimed marketplaces fora, ground drained from the marshy valleys that once separated the seven hills. Small, disconnected settlements had occupied each hill on its own, and only gradually did their residents begin interacting with one another. That interaction bonded the separate groups together, and draining the valleys between them let the city function as one place instead of seven.

  In the early 4th century BC, the Servian Walls rose to protect the seven hills, now fused into a single city. The walls enclosed the same ground the seven hills had already come to share as one settlement.

  Five of the seven, the Aventine, Caelian, Esquiline, Quirinal, and Viminal, now hold monuments, buildings, and parks scattered across the modern city. The Capitoline Hill is now the site of Rome's city hall. The Palatine Hill forms part of the city's main archaeological area.

  Rome's example didn't stay confined to Italy.

• 5. Seven Hills Beyond Rome

  ›

  Sheffield is said to be built on seven hills too, following the example set by Rome. Istanbul and Lisbon are said to make the same claim. Providence and three Massachusetts cities, Worcester, Somerville, and Newton, complete the list of cities said to share this seven-hill claim.

  None of these cities, though, would carry the symbolic weight Rome's number was about to take on in scripture.

• 6. A Beast on Seven Mountains

  ›

  In the Book of Revelation, a figure called the Whore of Babylon is described sitting on "seven mountains." Many Christian readers took those seven mountains as a direct pointer to the seven hills of Rome. They read it too as a reference to the pagan Roman Empire that once ruled from those hills.

  Protestants later gave the image a second meaning, reading the seven mountains as a jab at the Catholic Church. They pointed to the Pope, who holds the title of patriarch of Rome.

  Centuries after Revelation, the same seven summits would draw a very different kind of writer, one working in fiction rather than prophecy.

• 7. Seven Hills in Fiction

  ›

  In a 2019 interview, novelist Lindsey Davis described her plan to set an entire series of books on the seven hills of Rome. That plan reached completion with A Capitol Death, the seventh novel in her Flavia Albia series. The series had begun years earlier with The Ides of April, a book set on the Aventine Hill.

  Whatever comes after A Capitol Death, it will still have six other ancient hills left to explore.