Monti is the most unusual Roman neighbourhood for visitors because it sits directly next to the Colosseum and the Forum - the most-touristed monuments in Italy - and is mostly indifferent to them. The locals shop on Via dei Serpenti, drink on the steps of Madonna dei Monti, eat at Trattoria Monti, and walk past the Forum twice a day without much notice. The neighbourhood has been residential for two millennia. The ancient Suburra was here in Republican times. The medieval Monti was here through the Middle Ages. The 19th-century Monti was here under the Kingdom of Italy. The current bohemian Monti was here through the 1990s and 2000s. The continuity is the unusual part.
The Suburra: Caesar's neighbourhood
In Republican Rome the Suburra district - which corresponded roughly to modern Monti, plus parts of the Esquiline Hill - was the city's densely-populated working-class quarter. The streets were narrow, the buildings (insulae) tall and unstable, the population a mix of plebeians, freed slaves, immigrants from across the empire, prostitutes, gangsters, the urban poor. Cicero called it "the most crowded district in Rome". Juvenal wrote satires about its noise and squalor. The Suburra ran from the foot of the Capitoline Hill (where it met the more respectable Forum) up the slopes of the Esquiline and Viminal hills.
Julius Caesar was born and raised in the Suburra (his family had a house on the western slope of the Esquiline, near the modern Piazza Madonna dei Monti). The Caesar family - despite their patrician status - had financial trouble through the late Republic and were living modestly in this working-class quarter when Caesar was a boy. The biographer Suetonius noted this: that Caesar's path from the Suburra to the Palatine Hill (where, as dictator, he eventually lived) was the path from the working class to the ruling class. The character of the modern Monti - mixed-class, residential, working - still preserves something of that 2,000-year-old Suburra identity.
Nero's Golden House
After the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD - which devastated 10 of the city's 14 districts including the Suburra - the Emperor Nero seized about 200 acres of the burned-out land (between the Palatine and Esquiline hills) and built the Domus Aurea, the "Golden House". This was a vast palace complex (about 150 rooms identified so far, with more being excavated), decorated with gold leaf, painted frescoes, a revolving banqueting hall with a celestial-themed ceiling, and surrounded by parks with an artificial lake (where the Colosseum would later stand).
Nero's successors (Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, then Trajan) systematically destroyed the Domus Aurea after his suicide in 68 AD - filling rooms with rubble, building public baths on top (the Trajan Baths), and giving the land back to the city. The artificial lake was drained and the Colosseum built in its place (which is why the Colosseum is called the Colosseum - it was near Nero's giant "Colossus" statue, which was demolished later). The Domus Aurea was rediscovered in the late 15th century when Renaissance artists - Raphael, Pinturicchio, Michelangelo - lowered themselves through holes in the ceiling to copy the frescoes, which they called "grotesques" because the rooms were underground "grotte". The grotesque style spread through Renaissance art from these copies.
Today the Domus Aurea is open for guided tours only (€20, 75 min, book 2-4 weeks ahead at coopculture.it). The tour walks through a dozen excavated rooms; a VR headset shows what the painted ceilings looked like. One of the most extraordinary visits in Rome, far less crowded than the Colosseum next door.
Trajan's Forum and Trajan's Markets
The 112 AD Trajan's Markets - on the slope of the Quirinal Hill where it meets Monti - are sometimes called "the world's first shopping mall". The complex - six floors of brick-faced shops, offices and warehouses, designed by Apollodorus of Damascus - housed about 150 individual shops selling everything from fish to silk to wine. The arched main hall is mostly intact; you can walk through it. The adjacent Trajan's Forum (113 AD) included the Trajan Column - the 30-metre marble column depicting Trajan's two Dacian wars in spiralling relief, with about 2,500 figures carved across 200 metres of bas-relief. Both are part of the Imperial Forums archaeological zone; €16 ticket combines them with the Roman Forum and Colosseum.
The medieval and Renaissance Monti
From the 6th century onwards Monti was depopulated as Rome shrank - the aqueducts had been cut by the Gothic Wars, the upper-city water supply failed, the population retreated towards the Tiber. The Esquiline Hill became a region of gardens, vineyards, and isolated churches. Through the medieval period the neighbourhood was thinly populated; the great basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore (on the eastern edge of modern Monti) anchored the religious community.
The Renaissance brought back density. Popes Sixtus IV and Sixtus V rebuilt Monti's churches and streets in the 1470s-1590s. Madonna dei Monti (1581) was built as a parish church for the rebuilt neighbourhood; the fountain in front (1589, by Giacomo della Porta) was part of the same urban-renewal programme. San Pietro in Vincoli - the church holding Michelangelo's Moses (1515) - had been here since the 5th century; it was renovated in the Renaissance to receive the Julius II tomb commission.
The 19th-century cutting
Rome became the capital of unified Italy in 1871, and the new state was determined to modernise the city. Via Cavour - the broad new boulevard cutting from Termini station to the Forum - was driven through the medieval heart of Monti in 1881-1888. The cutting destroyed several medieval streets and reshaped the neighbourhood's geometry. The new street brought traffic but also new residents - civil servants for the Italian state, who moved into the rebuilt apartment blocks on Via Cavour and Via dei Serpenti. The neighbourhood became middle-class through the early 20th century.
The 20th century and the artists
Through the 20th century Monti remained a residential, mixed-class neighbourhood - middle-class on Via Cavour, working-class on the side streets, increasingly a destination for university students from the nearby La Sapienza and Roma Tre. Pier Paolo Pasolini lived briefly on Via Panisperna in the 1950s. The 1980s and 1990s saw an influx of artists and designers who could no longer afford Trastevere; the modern bohemian Monti dates from this period. The neighbourhood retains a notable population of working artists, fashion designers, film-industry technicians, and the kind of small architectural practice that the rest of the centro storico has priced out.
The 2009 opening of Mercatino Monti (the weekend craft market at the Hotel Palazzo Manfredi) consolidated the indie-design identity. The vintage strip on Via dei Serpenti developed through the 2000s and 2010s. The cluster of small bistros and bars around Piazza Madonna dei Monti is the latest layer. Through all this the residential population has held - Monti is one of the few central Roman neighbourhoods where ordinary working-and-middle-class families still live alongside the tourist economy. The neighbourhood is one of the few in central Rome where a 60-something Italian grandmother might be your shop-counter neighbour at the bar. The continuity, from the Suburra to today, is the unusual part.
