"Le tombeau de Cecilia-Metella était devenu un château fort alors aux mains des Caëtani, et autour du château s'était formé un village avec son église, dont on a récemment retrouvé les restes."—Ampère, Voyage Dantesque.
It is at Cecilia Metella's tomb that the beauties of the Via Appia really begin. A very short distance further, we emerge from the walls which have hitherto shut in the road on either side, and enjoy uninterrupted views over the Latin plain, strewn with its ruined castles and villages—and the long lines of aqueducts, to the Sabine and Alban mountains.
"The Via Appia is a magnificent promenade, amongst ruinous tombs, the massive remains of which extend for many miles over the Roman Campagna. The powerful families of ancient Rome loved to build monuments to their dead by the side of the public road, probably to exhibit at once their affection for their relations and their own power and affluence. Most of these monuments are now nothing but heaps of ruins, upon which are placed the statues and sculptures which have been found in the earth or amongst the rubbish. Those inscriptions which have been found on the Via Appia bear witness to the grief of the living for the dead, but never to the hope of reunion. On a great number of sarcophagi or the friezes of tombs may be seen the dead sitting or lying as if they were alive, some seem to be praying. Many heads have great individuality of character. Sometimes a white marble figure, beautifully draped, projects from these heaps of ruins, but without head or hands; sometimes a hand is stretched out, or a portion of a figure rises from the tomb. It is a street through monuments of the dead, across an immense churchyard; for the desolate Roman Campagna may be regarded as such. To the left it is scattered with the ruins of colossal aqueducts, which, during the time of the emperors, conveyed lakes and rivers to Rome, and which still, ruinous and destroyed, delight the eye by the beautiful proportions of their arcades. To the right is an immense prairie, without any other limit than that of the ocean, which, however, is not seen from it. The country is desolate, and only here and there are there any huts or trees to be seen."—Frederika Bremer.
"For the space of a mile or two beyond the gate of S. Sebastiano, this ancient and famous road is as desolate and disagreeable as most of the other Roman avenues. It extends over small, uncomfortable paving-stones, between brick and plastered walls, which are very solidly constructed, and so high as almost to exclude a view of the surrounding country. The houses are of the most uninviting aspect, neither picturesque, nor homelike and social; they have seldom or never a door opening on the wayside, but are accessible only from the rear, and frown inhospitably upon the traveller through iron-grated windows. Here and there appears a dreary inn, or a wine-shop, designated by the withered bush beside the entrance, within which you discover a stone-built and sepulchral interior, where guests refresh themselves with sour bread and goat's-milk cheese, washed down with wine of dolorous acerbity.
"At frequent intervals along the roadside, up rises the ruin of an ancient tomb. As they stand now, these structures are immensely high, and broken mounds of conglomerated brick, stone, pebbles, and earth, all molten by time into a mass as solid and indestructible as if each tomb were composed of a single boulder of granite. When first erected, they were cased externally, no doubt, with slabs of polished marble, artfully wrought, bas-reliefs, and all such suitable adornments, and were rendered majestically beautiful by grand architectural designs. This antique splendour has long since been stolen from the dead, to decorate the palaces and churches of the living. Nothing remains to the dishonoured sepulchres, except their massiveness.
"Even the pyramids form hardly a stranger spectacle, or a more alien from human sympathies, than the tombs of the Appian Way, with their gigantic height, breadth, and solidity, defying time and the elements, and far too mighty to be demolished by an ordinary earthquake. Here you may see a modern dwelling, and a garden with its vines and olive-trees, perched on the lofty dilapidation of a tomb, which forms a precipice of fifty feet in depth on each of the four sides. There is a house on that funeral mound, where generations of children have been born, and successive lives have been spent, undisturbed by the ghost of the stern Roman whose ashes were so preposterously burdened. Other sepulchres wear a crown of grass, shrubbery, and forest-trees, which throw out a broad sweep of branches, having had time, twice over, to be a thousand years of age. On one of them stands a tower, which, though immemorially more modern than the tomb, was itself built by immemorial hands, and is now rifted quite from top to bottom by a vast fissure of decay; the tomb-hillock, its foundation, being still as firm as ever, and likely to endure until the last trump shall rend it wide asunder, and summon forth its unknown dead.
"Yes, its unknown dead! For, except in one or two doubtful instances, these mountainous sepulchral edifices have not availed to keep so much as the bare name of an individual or a family from oblivion. Ambitious of everlasting remembrance as they were, the slumberers might just as well have gone quietly to rest, each in his pigeon-hole of a columbarium, or under his little green hillock, in a grave-yard, without a headstone to mark the spot. It is rather satisfactory than otherwise, to think that all these idle pains have turned out so utterly abortive."—Hawthorne.
Near the fourth milestone, is the tomb of Marcus Servilius Quartus (with an inscription), restored by Canova in 1808. A bas-relief of the death of Atys, killed by Adrastus, a short distance beyond this, has been suggested as part of the tomb of Seneca, who was put to death "near the fourth milestone" by order of Nero. An inscribed tomb beyond this is that of Sextus Pompeius Justus.
Near this, in the Campagna on the left, are some small remains, supposed to be those of a Temple of Juno.
Beyond this a number of tombs can be identified, but none of any importance. Such are the tombs of Plinius Eutychius, erected by Plinius Zosimus, a freedman of Pliny the younger; of Caius Licinius; the Doric tomb of the tax-gatherer Claudius Philippanus, inscribed "Tito. Claudio. Secundo. Philippiano. Coactori. Flavia. Irene. Vxori Indulgentissimo;" of Rabinius, with three busts in relief; of Hermodorus; of Elsia Prima, priestess of Isis; of Marcus C. Cerdonus, with the bas-relief of an elephant bearing a burning altar.