Mausoleum of Augustus: The Emperor's Tomb

Why is it significant?

Walk to the railing and look down into the sunken garden: a vast round ruin of brick and concrete, ringed with cypresses, almost ninety metres across, sitting in a pit below the stern 1930s buildings of the square. This is the Mausoleum of Augustus, the largest circular tomb of the Roman world.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk to the railing and look down into the sunken garden: a vast round ruin of brick and concrete, ringed with cypresses, almost ninety metres across, sitting in a pit below the stern 1930s buildings of the square. This is the Mausoleum of Augustus, the largest circular tomb of the Roman world.

Augustus began it remarkably early, around 28 BC, when he was about thirty-five and fresh from his victory over Antony and Cleopatra. In Alexandria he had just gazed on the embalmed body of Alexander the Great, and a man who builds his grave at thirty-five is not thinking about death. He is thinking about dynasty. The first to be laid here was his nephew and heir Marcellus, in 23 BC. Augustus followed in 14 AD, and the last emperor buried inside was Nerva, in 98.

Then the tomb lived a dozen other lives. In the Middle Ages the Colonna family turned it into a fortress. Later it became a garden, then an open-air arena for bull games, fireworks and shows, and in the early 20th century a concert hall called the Augusteo, where Rome's great orchestra played. In 1936 Mussolini shut the concerts down, stripped the building back to its ancient core, and built this square around it as a stage for himself as the new Augustus.

For decades after that, the ruin stood closed and overgrown, a home for weeds and stray cats in the middle of the city. After a long restoration it finally reopened to visitors in 2021. Inside its rings of corridors you get closer than anywhere else in Rome to the man who invented the Roman Empire... and who, remember, left his life story in bronze at its door.

So here is the end of the walk, and the full circle. You began where Caesar was murdered, and you end at the tomb of the heir who turned that murder into an empire. In between you crossed his city: his rival's theatre, his friend's baths, his sundial, his altar of peace, all lying a few metres under the shopping streets. Every step today was on top of an emperor. Via del Corso, just to the east, will carry you back into the living city.