 Hey everybody, this is Darius Arya for Ancient Rome Live and today we're going to be talking about the mausoleum of Augustus. So let's jump right in and see how this fantastic monument still stands. So the mausoleum of Hadrian is something absolutely magnificent, one of the largest ruins still standing in the city of Rome today. We'll take a look at the structure itself and its legacy. So we'll start with its model, which is going to be the earlier mausoleum in the city, the mausoleum of Augustus. We'll jump over then to look at the location where the mausoleum of Hadrian is located on the Trastevere, the other side of the Tiber River. We'll talk about its scale, we'll talk about its appearance and antiquity. Of course it looks very different today because it becomes a papal fortification. We'll talk about it in terms of how it improved on the original design, the mausoleum of Augustus, which is poorly preserved in comparison. And then we'll talk about the legacy of the mausoleum of Hadrian. What happened in the Gothic Wars in the 6th century where it starts to really get pilfered, trashed, and then how it takes on a new life and a new identity in the papal period and ultimately leaves it for us to enjoy today. One of the most visited sites, I think, of the top five in the city of Rome today. So it really is an impressive structure, it captures the imagination, and let's dive right in. In the distant there we catch a glimpse of the cupola of St. Peter's, making our way along a region that becomes known as Prati, the meadowlands. There's our gigantic flood walls constructed at the end of the 19th century. And of course here we have dominating the landscape and the skyline, the magnificent Castel Sant'Angelo, and we have it joining to the campus marshes through this bridge, which is a reconstruction of the ancient bridge that also served to link the campus marshes area to the other side of the Tiber River trans-Tiberdom. You can see the mausoleum has been converted into a fortification, and what sits on top is a magnificent bronze statue of an angel sheathing his sword, ending a plague that had devastated the city population. The Romans never forgot that divine intervention, and they remember it still today with this statue, atop the remains of the mausoleum of Hadrian. Now what's then the model for the mausoleum of Hadrian? It's the mausoleum of Augustus, it's located in the northern campus marshes about 800 meters away from the mausoleum of Hadrian, and its dimensions will be the basis for the dimensions of the mausoleum of Hadrian, so it's going to have a base of about 90 meters and a height of 45 meters, so that's roughly 300 Roman feet by 150 Roman feet. Keep in mind that the height of the pantheon is 150 Roman feet. So this is something gargantuan and scale, and the models for the mausoleum of Augustus was one of the wonders of the ancient world, the mausoleum of Halakarnassus. Because we don't know exactly what the exterior appearance was exactly, we have a nice description by an Augustan author, Strabo, maybe it was also based upon the large atruscan tumulus tuned with kind of earth dumped on top of it and planted with trees. We don't know, we do know that it was planted with cypress trees in the restoration of the area on the mausoleum. They replanted cypress trees, but was it more stacked like in this fantastical kind of reconstruction, or is it more like a big mound on top? Meet with that as it may, there were many people buried inside, Agrippa, Marcellus, preceding the death of Augustus, there were some of his heirs, Augustus dies, his wife is buried inside, many family members, but famously the emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Not Nero, and finally Nerva are going to be buried inside. The Flavian dynasty decides to actually be interred in their in their own family, have their own temple on the on the kernel. So what happened subsequently? Why is it so unimpressive compared to the remains of the mausoleum of Augustus? It was pilfer for materials, it became a fort, it was retrofitted into gardens, even a bullring, because it's kind of hollowed out and the grand height had long since disappeared, even being an opera house in the early 20th century. Finally, the whole area is liberated in parentheses by Mussolini, who then also installs next door the remains of the Arapakis. And so you're getting this whole kind of new center and new area to celebrate the emperor Augustus, with whom Mussolini saw himself heavily associated and affiliated with. The current restoration project that we're now going to show you, they're digging out a big public area for a ramp to give access into the site to make it into a new museum space, possibly as early as 2021. So what we see here then is the mausoleum of Augustus. It's not nearly as tall as the mausoleum of Hadron that we're going to investigate. We can see it's a job site and we can see the glass walls of the Arapakis Museum in the distance. This was taken about four days ago. Okay, what's the original appearance then of the mausoleum of Hadron? It models itself after the mausoleum of Augustus. It has the same north-south orientation. And the dimensions are going to be the same. The drum is 300 Roman feet. The height is at least 45 to 50 meters high. And the main difference then is you're going to have that big large square base at the bottom. And we're told it's more lavishly decorated. So whereas the mausoleum of Augustus was known for being covered with a lot of concrete cores covered and faced with travertine stone and some marble, instead this was entirely achieved in marble. And it's going to be built between 125 and 139. Hadron himself dies in Baia in 138. And so his successor, Antsnais Pius, is going to be completing the project. Let's have a look right here. This is how the mausoleum looks this week. Just beautiful. And we can see the bridge is going to be connecting to the mausoleum. I'm going to say a word about that too. Because the location, location, location is ever important. As opposed to being in the campus marshes where there probably wasn't enough room to build something so large at that point. We have a new location. Let's take a look. Castles and Angles is one of the most visited sites in all of Rome. It is the people palace that sits atop the remains of the once magnificent mausoleum of Hadron itself modeled after the mausoleum of Augustus and connecting to the other side of the Tiber River. There was a bridge, the Ponsilius. This is the modern version. And it follows along the same pathway, connecting then the center of Rome, the campus marshes area to the other side, Trastevite. Okay. So why would you spend all that time and effort then to build a bridge to another side of town, which is really, you know, outside the city center. Land is cheap. The property belonged to the Imperial family already. The Horti of Demetia, probably Demetian's wife or a relative of Nero. And we're told that it was a lavish estate that even Aurelian preferred that as one of his residences, even over the Palatine Hill. So there was a place with lots of land and landscaping, but by and large, unheavily developed. So by building a bridge, you're now making it publicly accessible, very easily to go over to this portion of the area beforehand, really just an area used by the Imperial family. Now it's for everybody to get connected to the new mausoleum in this city, the one that's going to surpass the mausoleum of Augustus, name the bridge after your family name. And it's completed according to this coin by 134. The bridge that we see today, of course, is much later with the angels carrying the attributes of the Passion of Christ, designed by Bernini himself. But it goes right on top of the remains of the original pawns, Elias. And when we look at the coin up above there, it too originally was decorated with statuary. Here is that modern bridge today from the position of someone inside Castel Sanangelo. So it's a magnificent immediate connection. On the other side of the distance, campus marshes, more central. And on the side of the mausoleum, you're in Trastevere, the other side of the Tiber River, as the Romans like to call it. That's the Tiber River that still flows by today. Let's talk about scale and appearance. Again, we talked about some of the dimensions, about 300 Roman feet by 150 Roman feet. There are some chambers inside the square base around the rotunda that were probably just structural. You have an outer fence we're told would decorate with bronze peacocks, symbols of immortality. Two of them were found are now in the Vatican Museums. We're not sure in the end if this was the real appearance or not with trees planted on it in this way or was it much more heavily faced and the upper stories with marble? At the top that we're told there is a quadruple statue, so a four horse chariot. Whereas before in the mausoleum of Augustus, there was one only of statue of Augustus, however big it was. So the scale was gargantuan and everything that we see here was faced with marble and there was tons of statuary according to the ancient sources. So the original appearance based in Italian marble. I'm looking up at the drum right now with the papal castle sitting on top of it, but we can see the core is what? Tuff, blocks of travertine stone and lots and lots of poured concrete, which is filled with lots of aggregate in chips of travertine stone and volcanic stone. But again, the exterior were told originally was faced with marble. There were inscriptions. There were colossal statues. We'll see the remains of some of them in just a moment. And there were also big bronze statue groups. You went into an entrance, which you can see right here at the bottom picture. You can see it's massive because those are little those are people down below and the scale is an enormous celebration as you entered. And in the back wall there was a niche for a colossal statue, probably about 25 feet high, definitely of Henry himself. Then you went up a radial helicoidal staircase to the central chamber. And what we're going to get to that in just a minute with a little video. Here we are. I wound my way up through a helicoidal, so a kind of spiral that goes up also three dimensionally to the central chamber with the light shafts. Let's take a look at this central location where the urns and the sarcophagi of emperors would have been located. Of course, I'm standing right there on a modern bridge because this whole situation here is going to get modified when it becomes part of a papal fortification and then apartments. But here are some of the wondrous amounts of marble decoration. One of my former students there is standing by a colossal statue, so the scale was large. Absolutely breathtaking. How are they improving then in the construction of the mausoleum of Hadrian when we look at the mausoleum of Augustus? So you've got that large base around the tumulus. You've got a more complex path to the central chamber because obviously you're moving up three dimensionally. You're not just going across as you do simply in the mausoleum of Augustus. You've got a big bronze quadriga statue at the top versus a single statue. And let's face it, in the time of Hadrian, the area is much more open and remains much more open. The area around the mausoleum of Augustus is getting hemmed in by other buildings by the time of Hadrian. So it's just too crowded to fit in another mausoleum, take another area and that area thankfully remains really not built up so that we can appreciate the scale still today of the mausoleum of Hadrian. And finally it has that bridge that joins to it. So it's a much more complex set of structures that's being conceived of in the second century AD, more so than the mausoleum of Augustus, originally surrounded by lots of gardens. Okay, what's the legacy? The Gothic Wars. So first you're getting the mausoleum of Hadrian incorporated into the Aurelian Wall Circuit of the 270s. So it's already being thought of as a place for fortifications and in the sixth century it's being used as a castle, already as a fortification to withstand the Gothic incursion and particularly Procopius's account talks about the soldiers of Belisarius throwing down bronze and marble statuary down at the attackers. So that's why we're finding some of these colossal statues in fragments. Here you see an image of the peacocks that were the sort of bronze statues miraculously preserved, but would have been the sort of thing hurled down at the Goths attacking the forces of Justinians that have been sent to liberate Rome and Italy from the Gothic occupation. The peacocks that we've seen the photo here are copies. The originals are now inside the Vatican museums, but it's neat that we can put together bits and pieces of this fragments of history into an understanding of how magnificent and how beautifully decorated the mausoleum once was. And in the papal period, what happens? Briefly. Yes, we know it as Casa San Angelo. Yes, there was a plague in 590 with which this becomes associated because of the vision of Gregory the Great that the angel Michael, the sword thereby concluding the plague that had been afflicting the population. And that memory was never forgotten because that angel appears over the mausoleum. And with the passing of time, you're even finally going to have this bronze statue, which is actually mid 1700s. So it's, you know, later additions are created over time, but basically it went from a structure that was just so massive that didn't implode, that didn't get fully stripped down except for the marble. So it was used already in the sixth century as a fortification in the Gothic Wars. It's then being taken over by the Pope in particular connected to the Vatican by the Paseto, the bridge that you can see at the bottom left of the photograph of the mausoleum that connects then through the borgo over the ramparts, the castle to the Vatican itself. So already in the 13th century, there's a direct easy pathway to leave from the Vatican all the way over to the castle and the bastions, the ditches, the curtain walls that are all constructed. Again, we see in these photographs, they're going to be built over hundreds and hundreds of years. And in particular, this is a famous painting there of that's added to the papal apartments that are added, the date to the most of the 16th century, possibly attributed to a student of Raphael. These become luxurious apartments. This becomes a home away from home for the Popes. And the famous siege in the 16th century, 1527, when Charles V forces Sac Rome, in comes the Pope, some of the seven, and a thousand other people are there for quite a long time, holed up, secure, fortified, protected. So there's a long history, much longer history of the mausoleum as a reused monument, as a fortification, much longer than it was in use for entombing emperors and family members. In fact, if we think about how long it was used when we get beyond Nerva, the last one emperor buried in the mausoleum of Augustus, then we go to Trajan, buried in his column. And then we conclude here with the start of the new mausoleum of Hadrian, with Hadrian himself. We move forward to the end of the Severn dynasty, basically, and that's it in the in the early 200s. So today, the mausoleum of Hadrian, Castle Sinangelo, one of the greatest and largest and best preserved monuments from ancient Rome. It has an incredible legacy, and of course so much of the engineering and design of the Romans is evident in this structure. It's stripped of its sheathing, its protective layers, it's exposed here with all this famous concrete and tuff blocks, and yet still today it continues to resist. Thank you very much for joining me for today's discussion on the mausoleum of Hadrian and its legacy. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and get our newsletter so you're up to date with all the walks and live seminars we'll be offering as 2020 concludes and we kick off a whole new series and the free online course in 2021. Thanks very much for joining me for Ancient Rome Live.