THE CAPITOLINE HILL (캄피톨��오 언덕)

Medieval Rome had no centre. Other Italian towns that had been smaller in antiquity grew in clusters about their ancient squares, while Rome gradually shrank until its fora and major churches were on the outskirts, and the remnants of a metropolis settled in compressed disorder along the banks of the Tiber. When the city government decided to raise a communal palace in the twelfth century, it chose the deserted site of the Tabularium on the slope of the Capitoline hill overlooking the Republican Forum. The decision must have been dictated by the dream of renovatio - the restoration of ancient glory - as the hill had been the site of the Arx of the earliest settlers and of the major temples of Imperial Rome. Isolated from the everyday life of the city on a summit without paved access, the Capitol, or Campidoglio as the Romans called it, failed until the sixteenth century to arouse sufficient civic pride to foster the construction of a monumental communal piazza such as nearly every major Italian city had produced in the Middle Age. We owe to this delay one of the most imposing architectural compositions of all time; nowhere but in Rome had a Renaissance architect been given the opportunity to greate a grandiose environment for the political life of a great city.