Rome grew from pastoral settlements on the Palatine Hill and surrounding hills approximately eighteen miles from the Tyrrhenian Sea on the south side of the Tiber. Another of these hills, the Quirinal Hill, was probably an outpost for another Italic speaking people the Sabines. At this location the Tiber forms an S shaped curve that contains an island where the river can be forded. Because of the river and the ford, Rome was at a cross roads of traffic following the river valley and of traders traveling north and south on the west side of the peninsula.

The 29 settlements at Palatine and Quirinal were two of numerous Italic speaking communities which existed in Latium, a plain on the Italian peninsula, by the 1st millennium BC. Pieces of pottery have been discovered that indicate the area of Rome may have been inhabited as early as 1400 BC. The origins of the Italic peoples is not known, but they may have descended from Indo-Europeans who migrated from north of the Alps in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC or from a blending of these peoples with Mediterranean people, perhaps from North Africa. In the 8th century BC these Italic speakers — Latins (in the west), Sabines (in the upper valley of the Tiber), Umbrians (in the north-east), Samnites (in the South), Oscans and others — shared the penisula with two other major ethnic groups: the Etruscans, in the North and the Greeks in the south.

The Etruscans (Etrusci or Tusci in Latin) were settled north of Rome in Etruria (modern Tuscany). They deeply influenced Roman culture, as clearly showed by the Etruscan origin of some of the mythical Roman kings. The Greeks had founded many colonies in Southern Italy (that the Romans later called Magna Graecia), such as Cumae, Naples and Taranto, as well as in the eastern two-thirds of Sicily, between 750 and 550 BC.