Around the 10th century BC the valley between the Palatine and Capitoline hills was a waterlogged burial ground where cremation urns were sunk into the wet earth. Roman tradition placed the peace between Romulus and Titus Tatius at the Vulcanal shrine there. In the 7th and 6th centuries BC the Tarquin kings drained the marsh into the Tiber with the Cloaca Maxima, and stone buildings such as the Regia and the Temple of Vesta replaced huts. Floods kept washing in silt, so the Romans paved over it, raising the floor more than 3.6 meters. Under the Republic it hosted trials, elections and gladiator fights, Cato the Elder built the first basilica in 184 BC, and the Temple of Saturn held the state treasury.
Speakers on the Rostra traditionally faced north toward the Senate House until tribunes such as Gaius Gracchus turned to address the crowd. In 133 BC Tiberius Gracchus was clubbed to death by senators with broken bench legs, and in 63 BC Cicero denounced Catiline in the Temple of Concord before the conspirators were strangled in the Tullianum. After Caesar’s murder in 44 BC, Mark Antony’s oration led the crowd to burn the body in the Forum, and Antony later had Cicero’s head and right hand nailed to the Rostra. Augustus built the Temple of Caesar over the pyre site. In 663 AD Byzantine emperor Constans II stripped lead from the roofs, rain ruined the buildings, and the buried valley became the Campo Vaccino, a cattle field.
- Between 1540 and 1550, under Pope Paul III, marble from the Arch of Augustus and the Temple of Vesta was burned into lime for St. Peter’s.
- For Charles V’s triumph in 1536, about 200 medieval houses and several churches were demolished.
- Rome’s civic magistrates, the conservatori, lost control of excavation licenses to the papacy.
- A tufa wall found in 2009 dates construction to the 8th or 9th century BC, before Rome’s legendary founding.
- A sarcophagus and altar found in 2020 near the Senate House may be a memorial to Romulus.
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