Emperor Augustus built the first great Mausoleum in Rome, the monumental tomb where all the emperors of the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasty were buried, together with their relatives. The last one was Nerva.

To design it, Augustus probably took as a model the great burial mounds (tumuli) of the Etruscan world, which were the symbol of the wealth and power of their noble owners.

Rome had become the greatest power in the Mediterranean and had discovered the unrivaled luxury of the Persian and Hellenistic palaces, which soon appeared in the austere homes of the ancient republic, becoming one of the symbols of Power.

The same happened for the tombs among which (apart from the Pyramids) the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus stood out; it was one of the Seven Wonders of the world, and Augustus was also inspired by those fascinating and exotic examples.

Being an emperor and semi-divine, Augustus wanted a much larger and more monumental building, compared to other tombs that the Roman aristocrats had built along the consular roads, first and foremost on the Appian Way.

Instead of a consular road, Augustus chose a place of great symbolic importance: the Campus Martius, where the apotheosis of Romulus had taken place, where Agrippa's first Pantheon stood, and also was the Ara Pacis, which celebrated the end of a century of civil wars.

Hadrian undoubtedly took the Mausoleum of Augustus as a model, but he too wanted to build something different. In more than a century, many monuments and temples dedicated to the various deified emperors had been built in the Campus Martius; therefore the available space was limited, and there was no room for a new Mausoleum of that size.

This is why Hadrian chose an area that was close to the Campus Martius but was on the opposite bank of the Tiber, where he could have unlimited space. He built the Aelius bridge as a monumental and scenic access route, a true masterpiece of ancient hydraulic science.

Very little is left of the original decoration of the two Mausoleums, which has been plundered over the centuries: marbles and columns were reused in Roman churches and palaces since the Middle Ages.The large blocks of travertine and peperino that covered them were also used to pave the streets and squares of Rome.

The enormous marble sculptures that decorated the Mausoleum of Hadrian, for example, were broken into pieces to throw them on the besiegers, the Goths of Vitige. The bronze sculptures, such as the Quadriga of the Sun driven by Hadrian mentioned in ancient sources, were melted down. The same happened to the bronze statue of Augusto which once was on top of his Mausoleum.

The Mausoleums of Augustus and Hadrian have defied the millennia, overcoming natural and human catastrophes such as floods, earthquakes, wars and looting. They were both transformed into fortresses because of their tower-like shape, together with the Mausoleum of Caecilia Metella on the Appian way. They withstood fierce sieges such as those of the Visigoths, of the Vandals and the Goths in 410, 455 and 537 AD, and also the sack of the Lanzichenecchi in 1527.

You will discover this and much more in the book by Marina De Franceschini, «Castel Sant'Angelo. Mausoleum of Hadrian, Architecture & Light», also in English language.
It draws a parallel between the two monuments, reconstructs their thousand-year history and proposes a new and unprecedented reconstruction of their ancient appearance.