Rome's Geography, Explained

Many have heard the legend of Rome's founding, the story of the twin brothers Romulus and Remus being nursed by a wolf on the banks of the Tiber River. Romulus would eventually kill his brother and lend his name to the city and the empire. The reality is that humans occupied the place where Rome now exists far before its official founding date of 753 BCE. It's all due to this right here, the Tiber Island. It creates a convenient way to cross, making it an important junction for trade up and down the river, as well as across the river. This is actually a very similar story to Paris with its Ile de la Cité in the middle of the Seine. But we're not talking about Paris, we're talking about Rome. In this video, we're going to be talking about the history and geography of the Eternal City. This video won't go on for an eternity though, just about 10 minutes, so I'm going to be condensing a lot of history. I think the best way to explore this is from the inside out and as close to as chronological as we can. So if you've ever wanted to know about those seven hills or why the Vatican exists, then this video is for you. Let's get going after the bell. Okay, here's the map. I'm going to start by only talking about the area outlined right here. It doesn't really show up on modern-day maps, but it's the old Servian Wall system built in the 4th century BCE. It's so old that it predates the Roman Republic and was built during the Seven Kings of Rome phase. The first king was Romulus himself. The kings themselves are mostly legendary figures, but the wall was real. You can actually see a piece of that wall over near Rome's train station, Termini. It's this arch right here. The Servian Wall protected the seven hills of Rome. Here they are on the map. We've got the Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Chalian, Aventine, Palatine, and Capitoline. The last two are the most important, and you can tell because of the origins of words we use today, palace and capital, respectively. They also provide a clue about what happened on those hills. The Palatine Hill was packed with houses for the rich until Augustus built his palace on the hill and the emperors Tiberius and Domitian did the same thing. In ancient Rome, most of the Capitoline Hill was consumed by the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. That name, Optimus Maximus, clues you into the fact that it was really one of the most important temples in Rome. Another part of the hill was home to the Tabularium, the ancient Roman record office. You can still see it if you're looking at the Capitoline Hill from the Roman Forum. It's the base of this building here. The building is Rome's City Hall. It actually faces the Piazza Del Campidoglio. This magnificent plaza was designed by Michelangelo, the one named after the Ninja Turtle, back in the 16th century. The pattern on the pavement came to be one of the well-known symbols for the city. On the topic of the Capitoline Hill, it's one of my favorite spaces because it so perfectly encapsulates the layers of history that make up Rome. You've got the ancient Tabularium, a medieval church, Santa Maria in Aricelli, a Renaissance plaza, and the Victor Emmanuel II monument, built to honor the reunification of Italy at the turn of the 20th century. That's a lot of history in one hill. But there's more to Rome than just hills. There's the space between hills too, which I guess are called valleys. The valley between the Palatine and Avitine Hills is the Circus Maximus. It was the largest stadium in the Roman Empire, capable of holding 150,000 people. Now it's a grassy lawn where I saw Santana play at a charity concert in 2004. Listen, I'm just listing off the most important moments in the city of Rome's history, alright? The valley next door is one of the most important places in the ancient world, the Roman Forum. This was the center of Roman political and economic life from the 8th century BCE until emperors built their own forums elsewhere in Rome. Today it's a mishmash of ruins from various eras, but there are some notable structures. They include the Curia Julia, the home of the Roman Senate, built by Julius Caesar. It also features the Arch of Titus. Triumphal arches were built to honor Roman victories abroad, and this particular arch inspired Paris's Arc de Triomphe. The area within the old Serbian walls is basically the extent of Rome throughout the Roman Republic era. Octavian ushered in the Roman Empire period in 27 BCE. Emperors are really bad for democracy, but really good if you want a monumental city, and that's what happened in Rome. So let's talk about one monumental building that was snuck into the Serbian Wall Rome before we go outside of it. That's the Colosseum. It was built in 80 ACE. Construction began under the Emperor Vespasian and completed under Titus. Its location makes sense, as it's in a piece of flat land between the Palatine, Chaleon, and Esculine Hills. The land had previously been home to the Emperor Nero's palace and personal lake, which was filled in to provide the needed space. So we've covered Rome of the Serbian Walls, and it's time to introduce a new wall, the Aurelian Walls. The old Serbian Walls were built at a time when Rome was constantly under the threat of attack from neighbors on the Italian peninsula. They didn't really need walls for hundreds of years after when they had successfully extended their empire so far that no one was able to attack, though Hannibal did come close. By the late 200s AD, Rome wasn't looking so invincible anymore, and the Emperor Aurelian ordered the construction to begin. The wall was completed in 5 years, and later emperors made improvements to the height and the gates. You can actually check out a lot of this wall today, as it served to fortify the city well into the 19th century. The Aurelian Walls didn't actually contain the entire city of Rome when it was built, but it did encircle many of the newer, more important areas of the city. One such area was the Campus Martius, or Field of Mars. In the Republican era, it had been swampy and prone to flooding, and primarily used to drill Roman legions. But under the Emperor, starting with Augustus, it became a place to build some pretty impressive structures. Today, you can see that the front of the Pantheon has the name Agrippa on it. He was Augustus' architect and public worksman. He didn't design the iconic dome we know today, but he did design the original Pantheon, of which just the front porch remains. Agrippa also basically solved the area's flood problems, which was no small feat. Another major Campus Martius landmark is the Piazza Novona. This opened a few years after the Colosseum as the Stadium of Domitian. The Piazza's dimensions closely followed the shape of that stadium. It became a public plaza in the 15th century, and got renovated into the impressive space it is today in the 17th century. One last thing to note about the Campus Martius area. After the fall of Rome, the population of the city contracted, and most people moved from the hills into the Campus Martius. It became the center of medieval Rome until the 1800s when the city began expanding again. Let's hop across the river to another neighborhood within the Aurelian Walls. It's Trastevere. This neighborhood today is known for its narrow streets, hordes of international students, and some notable landmarks, such as Santa Maria in Trastevere. It's one of the oldest churches in Rome, dating back to about 340 A.C.E. Most of the church that exists today is from the 12th century, making it a great place to check out architecture and art from the medieval era of the city. While we're on the topic, let's dive deeper into the world of churches. There are a lot of Catholic churches in Rome, no surprise, about 900, making it the city with the most churches anywhere. Visitors can easily spend their entire time entering churches and marveling at the art and architecture. Let's highlight a few of the notable ones so we don't just talk about all 900. There's sort of a ranking system for these churches, and at the top are the four major papal basilicas. Unsurprisingly, St. Peter's in the Vatican is one of those four. It's the largest church in the world by interior volume, and even flexes on other large churches by drawing lines where their interior space ends. We'll talk more about the Vatican later, first we need to talk rest of the four major basilicas. The second is St. John in Lateran. This is technically the Pope's home church, not St. Peter's. Cathedrals are home to bishops, and St. John in Lateran is home to the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. This makes it a cathedral church. It's just a technicality though, as obviously the Pope makes St. Peter's his home church. If you walk down the Via Marulana, you'll find yourself at the third major basilica, St. Mary Major. It's the largest church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The last major basilica is St. Paul Outside the Walls. It's called that because it lies just outside of the Aurelian Walls. It's also called that because there is a St. Paul within the walls. I'm not kidding. That church is actually the first Protestant church built in Rome in the year 1880. Before we leave the cozy confines of the Aurelian Walls in Rome, I want to point out another important part of it, one of the northern gates. It's the Porta del Popolo, which is the entrance to the Piazza del Popolo. This large oval plaza is iconic, due to a few key design elements. First, there's a real Egyptian obelisk in the center. Three streets radiate out from the plaza, and the center one is the Via del Corso, a rare, long, straight street in Rome that leads right to the aforementioned Vittorio Emanuele Monument on the Capitoline Hill. This street is even more important when you consider that before the railroad, this was the primary way into Rome. Visitors would enter through this Aurelian Wall, pass into this massive open plaza, and continue down the Via del Corso. They'd also have to pass between the twin churches that almost act like guard towers. They kind of remind me of the Argonath from Lord of the Rings. The eastern side of the plaza connects to the Villa Borghese, a large urban park that in the 17th century was a garden villa on the edge of Rome for the elite Borghese family. If you follow the eastern road out of the Piazza del Popolo, you will soon reach the Piazza di Spagna. There is an intersecting street, the Via del Condotti, with some of the most fashionable shopping in the city. That street also points directly to the Spanish Steps, another famous Roman landmark. The Steps functionally are nothing more than a way to ascend a steep hill to Trinita Diamante, a Renaissance church owned by the French government. Ok, it's time to leave the comfortable confines of the Aurelian Walls to one of the more famous parts of Rome, a part that technically isn't part of Rome at all. It's the Vatican. The Vatican is the smallest country in the world by both land area and population. If you want a whole video about this tiny city-state, you can check out the one I've already made on this channel. But how did the Vatican become its own country? Well, in the Roman Empire times, it was home to many villas for the elite, located outside of town at the time. It was also home to the Circus of Nero, another stadium. This was where many early Christians were martyred in front of spectators, including, according to legend, St. Peter. In the 4th century, the first edition of St. Peter's Church was built on the site to commemorate one of the most important figures in Christendom. And in the 16th century, the Catholic Church built the St. Peter's on top of the site of the old one. I'm simplifying history quite a bit here, but after the fall of Rome, the Pope held both spiritual authority over the church and actual authority over an area known as the Papal States, which covered much of the Italian peninsula. During the Italian reunification movement, Rome and the Papal States were the last holdouts. In 1870, the Italian troops captured Rome and ended the Pope's temporal rule. But the Pope, Pius IX, refused the offer to keep the area within the Leonine Walls, which contained the current Vatican boundaries as well as a nearby neighborhood. There was an uneasy peace afterward without the Roman question as it was called settled formally. In 1929, the two parties finally reached an agreement, the Lateran Treaty, that formally set the boundaries of the Vatican to what they are today, with the Holy See as the rulers of a separate sovereign nation. Before we can move on from this topic, I have to mention the Castel Sant'Angelo, which began its life as the mausoleum to the Roman Emperor Hadrian, but it was converted to a castle for the Papal States. There's this physical connection between the castle and the Vatican that sort of looks like an aqueduct, but instead of carrying water, it carries scared popes. It's a passageway so the Pope can flee to the safety of the castle when necessary. That's pretty cool. So we've covered all of central Rome as best as possible, but there's a whole lot of city outside of the Aurelian Walls in the Vatican. Today, the Rome metropolitan area is home to about 3-4 million people depending on which boundaries you use to count. Most Romans live outside the Aurelian Walls. And I want to mention a couple notable areas outside of those walls. One is EUR, a business district built in the 1930s to host the 1942 World's Fair that never happened due to World War II. It eventually hosted the 1960 Olympics. The architecture is fascinating, sort of a modern classicism. You can see it in this building, sometimes called the Square Colosseum. EUR was a precursor to other European capitals establishing business districts outside of the core, like Paris' La Defense District and London's Docklands. Another area worth mentioning is Cinecitta, built during Italy's fascist period and located out here. It's the largest film studio in Europe and responsible for many of Italy's classic films, as well as the Spaghetti Western. This was a really fun video for me to make because I've studied in Rome before and have contributed to research about Rome's history and development throughout the centuries. I just love Rome. I like to think that I know quite a bit about the city and I love sharing that with you. But I must admit that I don't know everything about Rome's current events and the news media and it can be hard for me to decipher fact from spin. That's why I love Ground News. Let's look at this news story here about how the British Prime Minister is looking to Italy for examples of how to handle an influx of migrants. This is an article reported on by all sides of the political spectrum, and I can tell from this handy bar right here. It also compiles all the headlines in the main column and the differences in how news outlets portray the headlines is fascinating. Breitbart, a right-wing news outlet, says the migrant policy sparks a leftist hissy fit, while a news outlet that leans left says that the Prime Minister should brace for controversy over the policy. What's really neat is this summary Ground News generates at the top right here. It intelligently takes all the news articles and turns them into easily digestible bullet points. And that's not even the coolest thing. It can even change the summary based on political bias. The bias comparison even shows you how the news outlets differed on their reporting. It's just really cool. I've talked about Ground News on this channel in the past, and I've always used a US-based example, but I'm happy to show you that Ground News works internationally as well. It works great all over the world. In fact, I believe Ground News is so useful that I'm offering 40% off their Vantage subscription. You can only access this offer through my link, so go to ground.news.com or go click on the link on screen or in the description and support an independent media platform working to make the world's news more transparent.