Tomb of the Scipios: Rome's First Family Vault
Why is it significant?
Walk along the narrow lane between high walls and you could be in the countryside: ivy, cypresses, garden gates, hardly a car. Behind the gate on the left, in a small park, a dark doorway opens into the hillside.
Key Facts
| Place | Tomb of the Scipios: Rome's First Family Vault |
|---|---|
| Address | Via di Porta San Sebastiano 9, 00179 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.87600, 12.50050 |
| Part of Walk | Queen of Roads: Rome's Appian Way from the Baths of Caracalla to the Catacombs |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk along the narrow lane between high walls and you could be in the countryside: ivy, cypresses, garden gates, hardly a car. Behind the gate on the left, in a small park, a dark doorway opens into the hillside. This lane was the first stretch of the Appian Way, and that doorway leads into the tomb of the most famous family of the Roman Republic.
The Scipios began burying their dead here in the early third century BC. The oldest coffin belonged to Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, consul in 298 BC, Barbatus meaning the bearded one. His sarcophagus carries a short poem in archaic Latin praising a man whose good looks matched his courage, one of the oldest Latin inscriptions of its kind. The original now sits in the Vatican Museums. What waits in the gloom below is a faithful copy, standing where the old general lay for two thousand years.
Here is the twist. The greatest Scipio of all, Africanus, who defeated Hannibal at Zama in 202 BC, is not here. Attacked in the Senate by his political enemies, he withdrew in disgust to his villa at Liternum on the coast, and the historian Livy says he was buried there. Legend even claims his tomb told Rome, ungrateful fatherland, you shall not have my bones. Yet the same Livy reports that three statues stood at the entrance of this vault: two Scipios, and between them the poet Ennius, who had sung their wars.
Then the tomb was forgotten. It turned up in 1614, and was properly opened only in 1780 by the owners of the vineyard above, who promptly carried off the inscriptions to sell. In the third century AD, a family even built a house right on top of the vault, as if the Scipios were nothing more than old foundations. Nearby in the same park are smaller tombs called columbaria, dovecotes, their walls honeycombed with niches for the urns of freedmen and servants.
Keep going along the lane. Notice how the walls seem to close in on either side... in a few minutes the great gate of the city rises in front of you, with a lonely arch standing guard just before it.