Rus in Urbe V: the Caelian Hill
Part I: From the Archeological Park via Ss Giovanni e Paolo and the Roman Houses to Villa Celimontana
The Caelian Hill is without doubt one of my favourite parts of Rome. Barely five minutes walk from the hawkers and general kerfuffle around the Colosseum it feels a world away, and dizzyingly removed from the twenty-first century. Ancient churches, an aqueduct and the dusty charms of the Villa Celimontana, dripping with Gattopardian melancholy. It is exactly the sort of thing I love, I expect you do too.
Adjacent to the Esquiline, Palatine, and Aventine, and though two and half millennia, give or take, of occupation and detritus have reduced the accentuation of the hill and its surrounding valleys, one can still note “major” and “minor” parts of the hill, as they were described in antiquity.
The “major” has three spurs: that which the temple of the deified Claudius takes advantage of; that occupied by the complex of San Gregorio Magno al Celio; and that occupied by the Villa Celimontana (which until 1802 was the Villa Mattei). The “minor” is the area around the cliff-like Ss Quattro Coronati and occupied by the military hospital which is synonymous with the Celio for most Italians. Today I shall concern myself with a wander straddling the uppermost and lowermost spurs of the hill as seen on the map above.
The name of the hill, as ever, has various theorised origins. The most popular refers to the Etruscan general Caele Vibenna of Vulci, who is said to have camped his troops here in 578 BCE as the first step to making Servius Tullius Rome’s sixth king. An ancient name was also Querquetulanus meaning forested with oak, a reminder that it was largely rural even during the Republic, and only became a densely populated residential district during the high period of Empire in the second century, its airy heights and proximity to the Forum making it a desirable part of town.
We can see this increasing density of population in the city at large represented in the microcosm of the Roman houses discovered under the fifth century church of Sts John and Paul (Ss Giovanni e Paolo al Celio) during Church-sponsored excavations begun in the late nineteenth century. While searching for evidence of an earlier Christian structure, pre-dating the basilica, archeologists came across an early second century BCE domus (grand town house) which had subsequently been incorporated by the early third century CE into an apartment building with ground floor shops, and then the entire complex re-converted into a late Antique domus in the early fourth century. The rise and fall of population density in this corner of the Caelian is indicative of the wider fortunes of both city and Empire.
