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History
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No one knows precisely when Rome was founded. Excavations on the Palatine Hill have revealed the traces of an
Iron Age
village, which date back to the ninth or eighth century BC, but the
legends
relating to Rome's earliest history tell it slightly differently. Rea Silvia, a vestal virgin and daughter of a local king, Numitor, had twin sons - the product, she alleged, of a rape by Mars. They were supposed to be sacrificed to the god but the ritual wasn't carried out, and the two boys were abandoned and found by a wolf, who nursed them until their adoption by a shepherd, who named them
Romulus and Remus
. Later they laid out the boundaries of the city on the Palatine Hill, but it soon became apparent that there was only room for one ruler, and, unable to agree on the signs given to them by the gods, they quarrelled, Romulus killing Remus and becoming in 753 BC the city's first
monarch
, to be followed by six further kings. Whatever the truth of this, there's no doubt that Rome was an obvious spot to build a city: the Palatine and Capitoline hills provided security, and there was, of course, the river Tiber, which could be easily crossed here by way of the Isola Tiberina, making this a key location on the trade routes between Etruria and Campania. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Italy,
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