Vatican Hill

Vatican Hill is a hill located across the Tiber river from the traditional seven hills of Rome, that also gave the name of Vatican City. It is the location of St. Peter's Basilica.

The ancient Romans had several opinions about the derivation of the Latin word Vaticanus. Varro 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 . 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 , as preserved by the later antiquarian Aulus Gellius:

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