Rome has been continuously lived-in for over three millennia
Rome is Italy's capital and largest city, seat of Lazio and Roma Capitale—about 2.7 million people across 1,287 square kilometres, third among European Union cities. Myth sets the founding near 753 BC, yet habitation runs far longer, making it one of Europe's oldest continuously occupied places.
After the western empire fell, papal power rose; from the eighth century Rome headed the Papal States until 1870. Renaissance popes rebuilt the city as art capital. In 2019 some 8.6 million tourists made it the world's fourteenth most visited city and Italy's favourite, with a UNESCO historic centre and UN food agencies based there.
Its name is traditionally traced to Romulus, though Romulus may instead be named after the city, and other proposals link Roma to Rumon, an old name for the Tiber, to an Etruscan root meaning teat, or to Greek rhome, strength. Nicknames pile up: Urbs, SPQR, the Eternal City. Commodus even renamed it after himself in 192, a change undone once he was killed at the end of that year.
Traces of people reach back about 14,000 years, and stone tools, pottery and weapons attest roughly 10,000 years of presence. Most scholars now think the city formed as several villages merged around the largest one, on the Palatine, and its early population mixed Latins, Etruscans and Sabines. Legend gives it 244 years of monarchy under seven kings, from Romulus to Tarquinius Superbus, until the Romans expelled the last king in 509 BC and set up a republic led by two consuls elected each year.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus wrote that the lagobolon, the staff Romulus used to mark out zones for reading omens, turned up unburnt after a sacred hut of Mars on the Palatine burned down. Today the wider Metropolitan City of Rome Capital counts 4.2 million people.
Source: Rome
