Colle Oppio looks like a simple park at first glance, but the ground here is resting on the remains of one of ancient Rome’s most ambitious projects — the Baths of Trajan. The curved wall in your photo is part of the massive halls designed by Apollodorus of Damascus, the same architect behind Trajan’s Forum and Market, built around 104–109 CE. The story of this hill starts earlier. This was once a wing of Nero’s Domus Aurea, the extravagant palace he built after the fire of 64 CE. After Nero’s death, the palace became a symbol of excess, and successive emperors wanted to erase that legacy. Vespasian drained the artificial lake and built the Colosseum there; Trajan went further and covered part of the palace, placing public baths on top — a political gesture as much as an architectural one: taking private luxury from an emperor and giving the space back to the people. For centuries the baths served as a social hub. Senators, craftsmen, poets, and travelers all passed through these halls. Later everything collapsed, overgrew, and slipped into semi-ruin. In the Renaissance, artists descended into the buried rooms of the Domus Aurea to study the ancient frescoes — Raphael and his circle traced these motifs, giving rise to what we now call the grotesque style. By the 19th and 20th centuries Colle Oppio was reshaped into a public park: paths, trees, a calm green space overlooking the Colosseum, shared by residents of Esquilino and Monti. Yet even today, every corner still sits on layers of imperial history — cycles of building, decline, and rediscovery. And the blooming tree in your photo fits naturally into this rhythm: in Rome, new life always grows directly out of the ruins. As for the name Colle Oppio, it’s thought to come from the ancient Roman family Oppia, who owned land on this part of the Esquiline Hill. Over time the area became known simply as the “Oppian Hill,” one of the three traditional spurs of the Esquiline.
Rome rises on seven hills, and this walk takes us across two of its most revealing ones — Esquiline and Palatine. The Esquiline, once the city’s eastern edge, still carries traces of imperial gardens, hidden nymphaea, magical gates, and traditions that survived the fall of the empire. The Palatine, the hill of the emperors, preserves stadiums, palaces, terraces and views where the entire history of Rome — Republic, Empire, Middle Ages, Baroque and modern Italy — lies in a single panorama. Along the way, we meet the monuments, streets and layers we uncovered in this journey: the baths of Trajan, the Domus Aurea beneath the grass, the Palatine stadium, the Forum’s arches and temples, and the buildings that reshaped Rome across two millennia. And we pause for something timeless: a pastry shop on the Esquiline that has kept its flavours unchanged for more than a century — a taste of Rome as constant as its stones.
