Vatican Hill

Hill of Rome
Latin name	Mons Vaticanus
Italian name	Colle Vaticano
Rione	Borgo
Buildings	Circus of Nero
Churches	St Peter's Basilica

Vatican Hill (Latin: Mons Vaticanus, Italian: Colle Vaticano) is a hill located across the Tiber river from the traditional seven hills of Rome. It is the location of St. Peter's Basilica.

The ancient Romans had several opinions about the derivation of the Latin word Vaticanus.Varro (1st century BC) connected it to a Deus Vaticanus or Vagitanus, a Roman deity thought to endow infants with the capacity for speech evidenced by their first wail (vagitus, the first syllable of which is pronounced wa in Classical Latin). Varro's rather complicated explanation relates this function to the tutelary deity of the place and to the advanced powers of speech possessed by a prophet (vates), as preserved by the later antiquarian Aulus Gellius:

We have been told that the word Vatican is applied to the hill, and the deity who presides over it, from the vaticinia, or prophecies, which took place there by the power and inspiration of the god; but Marcus Varro, in his book on Divine Things, gives another reason for this name. "As Aius," says he, "was called a deity, and an altar was built to his honour in the lowest part of the new road, because in that place a voice from heaven was heard, so this deity was called Vaticanus, because he presided over the principles of the human voice; for infants, as soon as they are born, make the sound which forms the first syllable in Vaticanus, and are therefore said vagire (to cry) which word expresses the noise which an infant first makes".

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