Michelangelo turned Rome's sacred hill to face St Peter's instead of the Forum
For centuries the Capitoline Hill looked down on the Roman Forum. When Pope Paul III asked Michelangelo in 1536 to redesign its square, he completed a reversal begun in medieval times and pointed Rome's civic heart towards St Peter's. Part of his plan, a star-patterned pavement, was only laid in 1940, on Mussolini's orders.
The hill was once called Mons Saturnius, after Saturn. Its later name comes from the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and an old myth ties it to caput, head, claiming a human skull turned up when the foundations were dug. Begun under Rome's fifth king and finished under the last, the temple was built in 509 BC and was almost as large as the Parthenon. Romans saw the Capitolium as indestructible, and it gave English the word capitol; Washington's Capitol Hill is widely assumed to be named after it.
Legends cluster on its slopes. The maiden Tarpeia supposedly let the Sabines into the citadel and was the first to be thrown from the cliff later named the Tarpeian Rock. When Gauls sacked Rome in 390 BC, the fortified hill alone held out, and tradition says Juno's sacred geese raised the alarm. Julius Caesar climbed to the temple on his knees to avert a bad omen during his triumph; after his murder, Brutus and the other assassins shut themselves inside.
By the Renaissance the summit had become a jumble of decaying buildings. After a citizens' revolt in 1144, a senator's palace was built with its back to the ancient Forum, and Paul III wanted a showpiece to impress the Emperor Charles V, expected in 1538. Michelangelo faced two crumbling medieval palaces set at an awkward angle on sloping ground. He gave them new facades, added a mirror-image Palazzo Nuovo to create a balanced trapezoid, and centred everything on an ancient equestrian bronze of Marcus Aurelius, revered because people believed it showed Constantine.
Progress was slow. The grand stepped ramp was unfinished when Charles arrived, so his party had to scramble up from the Forum, and the square was completed only in the 17th century. Michelangelo's oval pavement, with an interlaced twelve-pointed star hinting at the heavens around the head of the world, was never built by the popes, perhaps because they detected a pagan undertone. The three palaces now house the Capitoline Museums, and the statue in the square is a modern copy.
Source: Capitoline Hill
