Piazza del Campidoglio

Interesting facts

Before Michelangelo's redesign the neglected hilltop was nicknamed the "goat hill", because goats were grazed there among the ruins.

The two existing palaces met at an angle of about 80 degrees, and Michelangelo aligned his new façades to that skewed plan instead of demolishing them.

The Palazzo dei Conservatori sits on the foundations of the ancient Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, parts of whose podium can still be seen in the museums.

In 1471 Pope Sixtus IV gave ancient bronzes, including the Capitoline Wolf, to the people of Rome, the gift usually counted as the founding of the Capitoline collections.

The Cordonata was made broad and shallow enough for riders to reach the square on horseback without dismounting.

The two black basalt lions at the foot of the Cordonata came from a Roman temple of Isis; they spent 1885 to 1955 in the Vatican before returning.

The reclining river god now called the Tiber was originally a figure of the Tigris, later reinterpreted as Rome's own river.

The bell tower of the Palazzo Senatorio was added between 1578 and 1582 to a design by Martino Longhi the Elder.

The star paving laid in 1940 was reconstructed from a sixteenth-century engraving by Étienne Dupérac that recorded Michelangelo's design.

Italy's 50-cent euro coin shows the square's paving with Marcus Aurelius, and the view was also printed on the 10,000-lire banknote of 1962–1977.

Why it is worth it

On the summit of the Capitoline, the smallest and most sacred of Rome's hills, Michelangelo made one of the first great squares of the modern world. Pope Paul III commissioned him in the 1530s to give order to a muddle of medieval buildings before the expected visit of Emperor Charles V, and the artist answered with a complete piece of stage design: a trapezoid space enclosed by three palaces, entered up a ramp, with a single ancient statue at its centre. He also turned the hill around. The Capitol had faced the Forum, the heart of ancient Rome; Michelangelo's square looks the other way, towards the city of the popes and St Peter's.

The approach is part of the effect. The Cordonata, a broad stepped ramp of Michelangelo's design, climbs gently from the street, and at its top the colossal ancient figures of Castor and Pollux stand beside their horses, flanked by the so-called Trophies of Marius and the first milestone of the Appian Way. Ahead rises the Palazzo Senatorio, Rome's city hall, built over the massive vaults of the ancient Tabularium, with Michelangelo's double staircase in front; reclining figures of the Nile and the Tiber lie at its foot, and a small figure of the goddess Roma in porphyry and marble fills the central niche. To either side, the Palazzo dei Conservatori and its later twin, the Palazzo Nuovo (1603–1654), show Michelangelo's giant pilasters rising through two storeys. Because the two side palaces are set at a slight angle rather than parallel, the square reads as larger than it really is.

In the middle stands the bronze Marcus Aurelius on horseback, one of only two bronze statues of a pagan Roman emperor to survive; it escaped the melting pot that claimed more than twenty others because for centuries it was taken for Constantine, the first Christian emperor. Michelangelo brought it here from the Lateran; the original is now kept indoors in the museums and a copy stands in its place. Around its pedestal spreads the pavement Michelangelo drew but no one built for four centuries — an oval with a twelve-pointed star of interlacing curves, laid out only in 1940 by Antonio Muñoz. The square was left unfinished at Michelangelo's death in 1564 and completed by Giacomo della Porta and others. The palaces on both sides house the Capitoline Museums, opened to the public in 1734 and regarded as the oldest public museum in the world; behind the Senatorio the hill drops to the ruins of the Forum.

Getting there

The square crowns the Capitoline Hill in the historic centre of Rome, just above Piazza Venezia. Ciampino–G. B. Pastine International Airport (CIA) is about 14 km away; most long-haul flights use Fiumicino. From Piazza Venezia the Cordonata leads up to the square on foot; beside it a steeper flight climbs to the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli.

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia

Piazza del Campidoglio is a public square (piazza) on the top of the ancient Capitoline Hill, between the Roman Forum and the Campus Martius in Rome, Italy. The square includes three main buildings, the Palazzo Senatorio also known as the Comune di Roma Capitale, and the two palaces that make up the Capitoline Museums, the Palazzo dei Conservatori and the Palazzo Nuovo, considered to be one of the oldest national museums, founded in 1471 when Pope Sixtus IV donated some of the museum's most impressive statues, the She-wolf, the Spinario, the Camillus and the colossal head of emperor Constantine. Over the centuries the museums' collection has grown to include many of ancient Roman's finest artworks and artifacts. If something was considered too valuable or fragile in Rome and a copy was made in its place for display, the original is likely now on display in the Capitoline Museum. The hilltop square was designed by Michelangelo in the 16th century at the behest of Pope Paul III.

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Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia