A Podcast about Rome. Part 4: The "Servian" Wall of the Early Republic.

A section of the Servian Wall on via di Sant’Anselmo.

Rome began with a wall. According to legend, on the 21 April 753 BCE Remus stepped over the wall of the Roma Quadrata (literally “the Square Rome”) that his twin Romulus had built on the corner of the Palatine Hill above the Tiber. This breach of his fortification so angered Romulus that according to the most common version of the story he killed his brother, and his settlement was named Roma in his honour.

The longest surviving section of the Republican era “Servian” wall at Termini Station.

The fourth century Republican-era “agger” echoes the embankment created by Servius Tullius in the sixth century BCE. Today part of that containing wall is below Termini railway station, at McDonalds.

The settlement within that initial wall would grow, and according to tradition new walls were begun during the reign of Rome’s fifth king, Tarquinius Priscus. They were, we are told strengthened by his successor Servius Tullius.

The Arch of Dolabella, Caelian Hill. An Augustan-era monumentalisation of the Porta Caelimontana of the Servian Wall, subsequently incorporated into a branch of the Aqua Claudia.

This, then, was a fortification of the sixth century BCE. However that which we today call the Servian Wall, and of which tantalising traces survive here and there, are rather later.

I asked a security guard nicely if I could peer into the corridor off the lobby of a building housing offices of the Bank of Italy. He shrugged with a slightly bewildered expression and said, without enthusiasm, “se vuoi” (if you want). An arch connected to the defence of the nearby Porta Sanqualis is incorporated into the building.

Largo Magnanapoli. The believed remains of the Porta Sanqualis visible in the roundabout.

Those sections of wall we see, for example, by Termini railway station, and popping up in improbable roundabouts and lobbies of palazzi postdate the kingdom. The construction of the wall was a response to invasion; their gradual abandonment testament to a new and (for a time) unassailable strength.