ROME, the capital of the kingdom of Italy, lies on the Tiber river, 17m. north-east from its mouth on the Mediterranean. It was the capital of the ancient Roman republic and of the Roman empire and became very early the headquarters of the Christian Church. With a longer record of continuous political and religious importance than any other city it is unique for its antiquarian interest. In the following account the general subject of Rome is treated broadly under two aspects, themselves subdivided. These are : (I) the topography and growth of the city of Rome, the evolution of which is traced from the earliest times to the present, and (2) Roman history, i.e., the political and social his tory of the Roman republic, empire, the mediaeval commune, and briefly the modern Rome.
The primitive city of Rome stood not in the Tiber valley, but on the ridges—so-called hills—of the Latin plain that jut unevenly into the valley. During the empire the city encroached more and more on the lower level till it covered the whole of the Campus Martius that lay in the wide bend of the river opposite the Vatican hill. These ridges, like the whole Latin plain, consisted of volcanic ash, partly cemented into hard tuff, which had, during a long series of eruptions in the Alban hills, filled an inland lake and built up an uneven plateau. In drilling wells outside of Rome's gates the f ol lowing strata, enumerated from top to bottom, are usually pierced: several layers of brownish ash or tuff, a stratum of cappellaccio or friable grey tufa mixed with alluvial sediment, sand and gravel of the former lake bottom, and finally pliocene clay. Where erosion has not been very active the volcanic deposit near Rome rises to about I oo feet. Nearer the Alban hills it is far deeper. Here and there drilling also encounters hardened streams of lava that flowed from the craters from time to time. The Appian way lies partly upon a tongue of hard lava that flowed northwards during one of the last eruptions, not long before historic times.
on the calcareous areas of Latium—on the Sabine and Volscian hills—which this ash did not reach, numerous remains even of Neolithic settlements have been found. It would seem that the site of Rome (and its neighbourhood on the south and east) was not an attractive place for settlement until about 1,000 years be fore our era, and the cause may well have been the activity of the Alban volcanoes. The first settlers coming from north of the Tiber seem to have taken possession first of the Alban hills and then of the Roman "hills." They were apparently shepherd and agricul tural peoples of the "Italic" branch of the Indo-European race, related to the Villanovans (q.v.) who were settling in southern Etruria at the end of the second millennium B.C. The highest and safest points (the Palatine hill, probably the Capitoline and the outjutting spurs of the Esquiline) seem to have been chosen for the first communities. The graves of these early people that have been found in the Sepulcretum at the edge of the Forum show that they were a cremating folk that possessed the same kind of utensils and pottery that have been found in the Alban cemeteries.
About the 8th century a related people, which however buried their dead, came in from the older settlements of the Sabine hills and built their straw huts on the Esquiline and Quirinal ridges. In the 6th century Etruscan princes seem to have conquered the whole of Latium. They soon organized these communities (which had apparently coalesced to some extent) into a city, and, bringing it into connection with the rapidly growing Etruscan cities north of the river, laid the foundations of a flourishing principality. Before they were driven out, about 500 B.C., a large temple had been built to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva on the Capitoline, a stone wall had been raised enclosing all the hill communities, and the forum valley had been drained so that the area could be used as a common market place.