“Rome's most feared hill was once the city's largest open grave.”
The Esquiline Hill enters Roman written history in the works of Varro, who in his Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum of about 47 BCE proposed that the name Esquiliae derived from ex-colere, to cultivate outside the city walls. Varro was Rome's most systematic scholar and he was frequently wrong, especially about words. A competing etymology proposed by Festus, the second-century grammarian, connected the name to a settlement of Oscan speakers who lived on the hill before the Latin city absorbed them. The root was already obscure when literate Romans first tried to explain it, which suggests the name came from a population earlier than the Romans themselves.
Through the Republic, the outer slopes of the Esquiline served as a dump for the bodies of the poor, of slaves, and of criminals executed near the city walls. Horace mentions this place in his Satires, written around 35 BCE, with visible relief that the patron Maecenas had converted the open burial grounds into terraced gardens. Gaius Maecenas built his horti Maecenatis on the Esquiline around 30 BCE, and the park included a reading tower from which guests could watch Rome spread across the plain below. The transformation was complete enough that later poets could describe the same hillside as simultaneously the depth of Rome's poverty and the height of its refinement.
The shift from Latin Esquiliae to Italian Esquilino followed the standard phonological collapse of the classical case system. The plural genitive -ae became -o as Vulgar Latin shed its endings over the fifth and sixth centuries CE, and the neuter plural merged with the masculine singular across the whole vocabulary. By the medieval period the name had settled as Esquilino in administrative documents, referring to the hill and its rione, the ward that enclosed the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, consecrated on the hilltop in 431 CE. The toponym outlasted the Latin language that coined it, which is not unusual: Rome is full of names that survived the civilization that gave them.
When Rome became the capital of unified Italy in 1871, the Esquilino underwent its most aggressive transformation since Maecenas planted his gardens. The piano regolatore of 1873 imposed new straight streets across the hill, and the 1880s saw the construction of Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II at its center. The neighborhood attracted government clerks, minor officials, and the lower middle class of the new state rather than the ancient families who favored other quarters. By 2010 the Esquilino had become one of Rome's most ethnically diverse neighborhoods, its market near Piazza Vittorio known for vendors from China, Bangladesh, and Somalia who have given the old Latin toponym a new human context.
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Today
The Esquiline Hill has been, within a continuous written record of twenty-six centuries, a burial ground for the abandoned, a pleasure garden for the wealthy, a Christian hilltop, a Baroque residential quarter, a bureaucratic grid for the new Italian state, and a multicultural immigrant neighborhood. These are not phases that succeed one another cleanly; they press down and remain. Walking through the Esquilino today, near the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore with its fifth-century mosaics intact above the medieval floor, it is possible to be standing in five centuries simultaneously without any special effort.
The name itself is a remnant from a language no one speaks, attached to a hill that has never stopped being used. Varro could not explain it in 47 BCE, and the question has not been settled since. The hill endures because the city has forgotten how to live without it.
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