Summer Tues-Sat 9am-6pm, Sun 9am-1pm; winter Tues-Sat 9am-3pm, Sun 9am-1pm; L12,000, last tickets 1hr before closing; L20,000 for a ticket that includes the Colosseum, Palazzo Altemps and Palazzo Massimo. Entrance either from the Roman Forum, or from Via San Gregorio. Turning right at the Arch of Titus takes you up to the ticket booth and entrance to the Palatine Hill , supposedly where the city of Rome was founded and holding some of its most ancient remnants. In a way it’s a more pleasant site to tour than the Forum, larger, greener and more of a park – a good place to have a picnic and relax after the rigours of the ruins below. In the days of the Republic, the Palatine was the most desirable address in Rome (from it is derived our word “palace”), and the big obloquy continued to colonize it during the Imperial era, trying to outdo apiece other with ever larger and more magnificent dwellings.
Following the main path up from the Forum, the Domus Flavia was one of the most splendid residences, and, although it’s now almost completely ruined, the peristyle is cushy enough to identify, with its fountain and hexagonal brick arrangement in the centre. To the left, the top level of the gargantuan Domus Augustana spreads to the far brink of the hill – not the home of Augustus as its study suggests, but the private house of any emperor (or “Augustus”). You can look down from here on its vast central courtyard with maze-like fountain and wander to the brink of the deep trench of the Stadium . On the far side of the stadium, the ruins of the Baths of Septimius Severus cling to the side of the hill, the terrace giving good views over the Colosseum and the churches of the Celian Hill opposite.
Walking in the opposite direction from the Domus Flavia, steps lead down to the Cryptoporticus (closed for restoration), a long passage built by Nero to link the vestibule of his Domus Aurea with the Domus Augustana and other Palatine palaces, and decorated along part of its length with well-preserved Roman stucco-work. You can go either way along the passage: a left turn leads to the House of Livia , originally believed to have been the residence of Livia, the wife of Augustus, though now identified as simply part of Augustus’s house (the set of ruins beyond). Its courtyard and some of the inner rooms are decorated with scanty frescoes.
Turn right down the passage and up some steps on the left and you’re in the Farnese Gardens , among the first botanical gardens in Europe, ordered out by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in the mid-sixteenth century and now a tidily planted, shady retreat from the exposed heat of the ruins. The terrace here looks back over the Forum, while the terrace at the opposite end looks down on the church of San Teodoro, crossways to St Peter’s, and down on the new excavations immediately below – the traces of an Iron Age village that perhaps marks the real centre of Rome’s ancient beginnings. The large grey building here houses the Palatine Antiquarium , which contains a vast assortment of statuary, pottery, terracotta antefixes and architectural fragments that have been excavated on the Palatine during the last 150 years. Much like the Forum Antiquarium, its most interesting exhibits are the very oldest, including models of how the Palatine looked in the Iron Age.
