Mausoleum of Augustus

Augustus began the tomb in 28 BC, during his sixth consulship, on his return from Alexandria after the conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt and the defeat of Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC; it was among the first projects he initiated in the city of Rome after that victory. At Alexandria he had seen the Hellenistic tomb of Alexander the Great, probably circular in plan, and the dynastic sepulchre he raised between the Via Flaminia and the bank of the Tiber drew on that model and on the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, built around 350 BC for King Mausolus and counted among the seven wonders of the ancient world. Finished, it measured 90 m (295 ft) in diameter and 42 m (137 ft) high — 300 Roman feet across, the largest circular tomb known.

Two pink granite obelisks brought from Egypt flanked the entrance, and the pillars beside it carried bronze plaques inscribed with the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, the emperor's own account of his accomplishments and victories. Inside, three niches held the golden urns of the imperial family, and a small square room at the centre of the building is taken to be the tomb of Augustus himself. The groves and walks laid out around the mausoleum were opened to the public.

The first laid inside was the young Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Augustus's favoured nephew and designated heir, who died suddenly in 23 BC. Before the emperor's own death the tomb also received Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, husband of Julia the Elder; Nero Claudius Drusus, son of Livia Drusilla and father of Claudius; and the emperor's grandsons Gaius and Lucius Caesar.

Suetonius describes the funeral of AD 14. The body was carried from Nola, where Augustus died, to Bovillae, the home ground of the gens Julia, and then to Rome. Two orations were spoken over him: one by Tiberius before the temple of the Divine Julius, the other by Tiberius's son Drusus the Younger from the old rostra. Senators then bore the body on their shoulders to the Campus Martius, where it was cremated; an old praetorian swore he had seen an eagle rise into the sky carrying the emperor's spirit. The leading men of the equestrian order, in tunics, unbelted and barefoot, laid the remains in the mausoleum, and Augustus took the centre of the building.

After him came Livia Drusilla, Tiberius, Drusus Julius Caesar, Germanicus, Antonia Minor, Claudius and Britannicus. Caligula placed there the ashes of his mother Agrippina the Elder and of his brothers Nero Julius Caesar and Drusus Caesar, and later those of his sister Julia Livilla and of Julia Drusilla. Nero had the body of his wife Poppaea Sabina buried in the tomb but was himself shut out of it, as Augustus's daughter Julia the Elder had been before him, and was placed instead in the mausoleum of his father's family, the Domitii Ahenobarbi. The last emperor for whom the doors were opened was the elderly Nerva, in AD 98. His successor Trajan was cremated and his ashes set in a golden urn within Trajan's Column, while Hadrian built the enormous new mausoleum that is now Castel Sant'Angelo, which took the emperors of the second century.

The monument, probably already abandoned, was plundered during the sack of Rome by Alaric's Visigoths in 410: by the traditional account the urns and precious fittings were stolen, the bronze tablets of the Res Gestae torn down and melted, and the ashes scattered, the structure itself left standing. Platner and Ashby, however, posited that "the story of its plundering by Alaric in 410 has no historical foundation, and we know nothing of its destruction". Part of the marble was probably burnt for lime in the kilns of the nearby river port at Ripetta. The urn of Agrippina the Elder is one of the few pieces to have survived, because in the Middle Ages it was pierced and used as a measure for grain; it is held in the Capitoline collections.

Through the medieval centuries the site was subject to the floods of the Tiber, the two obelisks at the entrance fell to the ground in pieces at an unrecorded date, and the building became a quarry for stone and marble, stripped slowly and systematically of its facings until only the base and foundations remained. By the end of the 10th century it lay buried under earth and overgrown with trees, and was called the Mons Augustus; a legend of the time held that Augustus had decreed that a basketful of earth from every province of the empire be thrown upon his tomb, so that he might rest on the soil of the whole world over which he had ruled. A chapel to the Archangel Michael stood on top of it, and beside it the church of Santa Maria — or perhaps Martina — in Augusto, later transformed into San Giacomo degli Incurabili. Memory of the real tomb was lost so completely that Romans took a third-century Roman marble sarcophagus carved with the rape of Proserpina to be the sepulchre of Augustus; the emperor Frederick Barbarossa had it carried to Germany in 1167 to hold the body of Charlemagne as founder of the new "Roman" empire, and it is still kept in the treasury of Aachen Cathedral.

In the course of the 12th century the Colonna family turned what remained into a stronghold. It was common practice in Rome to reuse the foundations of ancient monuments for private seigneurial bastions: the Caetani did it with the tomb of Cecilia Metella, the Orsini with the Theatre of Pompey, and the mausoleum of Hadrian became Castel Sant'Angelo. After the disastrous defeat of the Commune of Rome by the Count of Tusculum in 1167 the Colonna were disgraced and banished, and their fortification on the Campus was dismantled.

Through the Renaissance the ruin passed through the hands of several major Roman families. From 1512 it belonged to the Orsini, in particular to Franciotto Orsini. As the quarter repopulated during that century the adjoining land rose in value, and speculation in the houses built hard against the mausoleum drove up the price of the materials and statues taken from it to be sold. Excavation at its foot in 1519 uncovered one of the two obelisks that had decorated the ancient entrance; in 1587 Sixtus V had it moved to the flank of Santa Maria Maggiore, and the other now stands in the Piazza del Quirinale, brought there from the demolition of the sixteenth-century Ospedale di San Rocco at Ripetta between 1772 and 1776.

Under the Soderini the site became a pleasure garden set apart from the heart of the city. In the 18th century the garden and vineyard gave way to the Correa amphitheatre and concert hall, and across its long afterlife the ruin also served as an arena for bullfighting, as a theatre, and in the 19th century as a hospice for destitute old women. From the second half of the 1800s until 1936 it was known to Romans as the Teatro Augusto, or Augusteo: the principal seat of the Santa Cecilia orchestra, where hundreds of works were performed and where Arturo Toscanini, Gustav Mahler, Igor Stravinsky and Pietro Mascagni conducted. Mussolini ordered the concert hall closed in the 1930s and the building restored to the status of an archaeological site.

Between 1936 and 1940 the buildings that had grown up around and against the mausoleum were demolished and the Roman structure uncovered, the work carried out by the firm Tudini & Talenti. The restoration was staged in 1937, the two-thousandth anniversary of Augustus's birth, and formed part of Mussolini's reordering of Rome, which strove to connect the aspirations of Italian Fascism with the former glories of the Roman Empire; Mussolini saw himself as especially connected to the achievements of Augustus, a 'reborn Augustus' ready to usher in a new age of Italian dominance. The replanning of the surrounding area was designed by the architect Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo in line with the master plan of 1931 and culminated in the laying out of Piazza Augusto Imperatore in 1938. Much of what stands inside the mausoleum now — the brickwork and the marble tablets bearing the names of the Julio-Claudians — is the product of that 1930s reconstruction.

The neglect that followed — closed to the public, overgrown with vegetation, used as a dumping ground for litter — attracted criticism, especially after the Ara Pacis museum opened across the street in 2006. Restoration began in 2008 with a stratigraphic excavation inside intended to define and recover the original structure, followed by work to consolidate the weaker parts and make the whole area safe. A plan to have the mausoleum restored in time for the two-thousandth anniversary of Augustus's death in 2014 failed for want of funding. In March 2014 the city council approved a €12 million scheme for the surrounding square, and in January 2017 a €6 million grant from Telecom Italia was announced for a comprehensive restoration that would open the monument to the public for the first time since the 1970s. The April 2019 target was missed and the deadline moved to early 2021, with costs rising to €11 million, partly offset by further grants from Telecom Italia's successor Gruppo TIM.

The mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, announced in December 2020 that the monument would reopen, and it did so on 1 March 2021, by booking only and free of charge until 21 April, the Natale di Roma. It closed again on 6 June 2022 for the final phase of the works and for the redevelopment of Piazza Augusto Imperatore, with the central cylinder housing Augustus's burial chamber still unfinished. A new museum layout by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, part-financed by the Bvlgari Group, is scheduled for completion by the end of 2026.