Old Rome: A Handbook to the Ruins of the City and the Campagna

by Robert Burn

Beyond the Porta del Popolo on the edge of the Pincian hill, there is a very ancient piece of wall, faced in the style called opus reticulatum, which is made of small diamond-shaped blocks of tufa set in the surface of a mass of concrete. These blocks are driven into the concrete before the lime has dried and set. This ruin, which is called the Muro Torto, is often spoken of as having been a part of the house of Sylla but I do not know upon what authority. It may have formed a part of the substructions of some of the private buildings on the Pincian, previous to the time of Aurelian, who incorporated it in his wall. Near the angle of the wall where it turns sharply to the south is a point at which the brickwork leans in great masses considerably out of the perpendicular, whence the name of Muro Torto. Procopius speaks of this as having been in the same state long before his time, and calls it the broken wall.

Pons Ælius.

Passing along the bank of the Tiber by the Via Ripetta from the Porta del Popolo we come to the bridge of S. Angelo (Pons Ælius) which crosses the river close to the Castle of S. Angelo, anciently the Mausoleum of Hadrian. This bridge was built by the Emperor Hadrian at the same time with his Mausoleum. The anonymous writer of the Einsiedlen MS. gives an inscription which in his time remained upon the bridge assigning its erection to the nineteenth tribuneship and third consulship of Hadrian, which indicates the year A.D. 135, and in confirmation of this Nardini gives a medal of Hadrian which dates from his third consulship, and has on the obverse a representation of this bridge. The name Pons Ælius, given to it by Dion Cassius in his account of Hadrian’s funeral, was probably derived either from Hadrian’s prænomen Ælius, or from the name of his son Ælius Cæsar whose burial was the first which took place in the Mausoleum. The piers of the bridge are ancient, but the upper parts have been rebuilt.

Mausoleum of Hadrian.

The Mausoleum of Hadrian owes its preservation entirely to the peculiar fitness of the site and shape for the purpose of a fortress which it has served since the time of Belisarius. Had it not been thus made serviceable to the turbulent spirit of the mediæval Romans, the same hands which stripped the great pile of its marble facing, and, after hurling the statues with which it was adorned into the moat, allowed them to lie there in oblivion, would have torn asunder and carried away the whole mass to furnish materials for the palaces and stables of their ferocious and ignorant nobles. The original form of this colossal mausoleum is now greatly changed by the modern buildings which have been piled upon it, by the addition of the corbels round its upper part, and by the loss of the exterior facing of marble, so that the ancient appearance can be only conjecturally restored. The remaining ancient part consists of a square basement of concrete and travertine blocks, the sides of which measured ninety-five yards surmounted by an enormous cylindrical structure of travertine seventy yards in diameter and seventy-five feet high. Procopius tells us that this was cased in Parian marble, and that upon the summit stood a number of splendid marble statues of men and horses.[104] There are several other tombs in Italy constructed upon the same plan with a cylindrical tower placed upon a square base. Two of these are upon the Appian road about three miles from Rome, the celebrated Tomb of Cæcilia Metella, and that of the Servilii, and belong to the Republican Era. Two others are of the Augustan Age, the tomb of the Plautii at Ponte Lucano, near Tivoli, and the beautiful monument of Munatius Plancus, near Gaeta. Hadrian’s design was not therefore by any means a new one, as we might have expected in the case of an emperor who was himself an architect, and proud of his artistic designs.

It is plain from the history of Procopius that the statues of men and horses which he describes were upon the top of the building. For the defenders of the mausoleum against the army of Vitiges being hard pressed by the approach of the Goths under shelter of a testudo, in their despair seized these statues and hurled them upon the heads of their assailants, thus breaking down the testudines and repelling the attack. Of the exact order in which they were arranged we have no evidence. Tradition asserts that the twenty-four Corinthian columns destroyed by fire in the Basilica of St. Paul in 1823 formerly belonged to the Mausoleum of Hadrian, and that they were removed by Honorius.[105] A comparison of this tradition with a passage of Herodian, in which he says that the ashes of Septimius Severus were buried in the temple where rest the bones of the Antonini, has led to the conjecture that the columns formed the colonnade of a round temple on the top of the mausoleum in which temple Hadrian’s colossal statue stood, and that the bronze fir-cone found here, which is now in the Vatican garden, ornamented the summit. Round this temple, and upon the level top of the cylindrical tower, may have been arranged the various statues of which Procopius speaks.

The colossal head of Hadrian’s statue found here is still to be seen in the Museo Pio Clementino, the bronze gilt peacocks in the Giardino della Pigna. The famous Barberini Faun, now at Munich, and the dancing Faun at Florence, were amongst the ornaments of the upper part of the tomb. Another conjecture as to the shape of the upper part of the building is that it was surmounted by a smaller cylindrical tower, with a roof in the shape of a truncated cone, upon the top of which stood the colossal statue of Hadrian. There is not sufficient evidence to give any degree of certainty to either of these conjectural restorations.

The interior of the building, according to the latest discoveries, consists of a large central rectangular chamber (thirty-six by thirty feet wide and fifty-four feet high), approached by an ascending spiral corridor, leading from a lower chamber which communicated immediately with the principal entrance. The entrance was a high arch in the cylindrical tower immediately opposite the bridge; it is now walled up and the lower chamber into which it leads can only be approached from above.

In the central chamber there are four niches in which formerly stood the urns and tombstones of the illustrious persons buried here. A large sarcophagus of porphyry found here was used for the tomb of Pope Innocent II. in the Lateran, and the lid may still be seen in the Baptisterium of St. Peter’s, where it is used as a font. The chamber was lighted and ventilated by square passages cut through the stone in a slanting direction, and the rain water was carried off by other channels, which conveyed it into drains at the foot of the building. It does not appear to be certainly known whether other chambers may not exist in the interior which have not been yet discovered. Piranesi gives a number of additional chambers besides the two above mentioned, but his representation is probably conjectural.

After the burial of Nerva no more room was left in the Mausoleum of Augustus for the interment of the imperial ashes. Trajan’s remains were deposited under his column in the forum bearing his name, but Hadrian gladly seized the opportunity of adding another to the many colossal structures he had already reared. The mausoleum was begun at the same time with the Ælian bridge in the year A.D. 135. The bricks of which part of the building consists have stamps of various years of Hadrian’s reign, and show that the greater part of the building was erected by him, though Antoninus Pius probably completed it. Hadrian’s son Ælius, who died before his father, was the first Cæsar whose ashes were placed in this tomb. After him, Hadrian himself was buried here, and then the Emperor Antoninus Pius, and his wife the elder Faustina, three of their sons, Fulvius Antoninus, M. Galerius Aurelius Antoninus, and L. Aurelius Verus, the colleague of M. Aurelius in the empire, and a daughter Aurelia Fadilla.