For centuries travelers have visited La Piazza della Bocca Della Verità located just south of Rome’s busy center. The significance of this piazza is that the traveler can see in one-stop Rome’s many layers: from the Roman temples, Temple of Hercules and the Temple of Portunus, the Roman stone, La Bocca Della Verità located in the loggia of the sixth century Santa Maria in Cosmedin, to the eighteen-century Fontana dei Tritoni, sculpted in the earlier Baroque style of Lorenzo Bernini.
But Rome and its history do not stand still. Besides its well-known archeological sites, the city is developing a new site that has been hidden in plain sight for decades. I looked carefully at some of my older travel books, including a 1909 edition of the renowned Baedeker’s Italy: from Alps to Naples. There is only passing mention of what we must now define as one of Rome’s most important piazzas: Piazza Augusto Imperatore.
At its center is the first century Augustan family’s mausoleum that is now undergoing what must be regarded as the most important restoration of an archeological site in Rome in decades. At its ancient Roman street level, it sits well below the level of the modern piazza surrounding it.
In 1973 Carole, my wife, and I discovered this long-neglected monument. At the time, I was able to walk down to the unfenced and neglected site where I found a plaque hanging precariously on the stone wall that listed the names of the Augustan family interred in the mausoleum. The mausoleum was in a degraded condition, having been looted centuries ago, thoughtlessly repurposed over the centuries, and then abandoned for decades. But no longer!
Approximately seven years ago, during our daily walks through the piazza, we saw a fence suddenly go up around the site. Not long after, the original fence was replaced by its current fence that contains the mausoleum’s historic timeline. At the same time, we also noticed workers entering the mausoleum and scaffolding going up around the walls of the ancient structure.
Mario Erasmo’s Strolling Through Rome tells us that Augustus began construction of the mausoleum in the year 31 BCE after his victorious Battle of Actium and when he became the empire’s ruler. Augustus supposedly said, “I found Rome a city of bricks and I left it a city of marble.” Initially, it was the burial site of the family, from Augustus to Claudius, the fourth Roman emperor, who ruled from 41-54 and married Agrippina, his niece. A notable absence in the tomb is Augustus’s daughter, Julia, who was exiled by her puritanical father for her immorality. Augustus also exiled Ovid for what he considered to be Ovid’s immoral, erotic love poems. The insane Caligula’s remains are buried elsewhere in Rome.
The tomb also became the burial site of many other Roman imperial families, including the Julio Claudian line beginning in 23 BCE down to Nerva, in 410. It was for centuries a holy and revered site.
But in 410 Alaric and the invading Visigoths sacked the mausoleum and carried away all its contents. The fence contains drawings of the mausoleum as it might have appeared originally and in its reconstruction over the centuries. By the twelfth century, the powerful Colonna family used it as a fortress. In the sixteenth century, Francesco Soderini purchased the mausoleum, annexed it to his villa, and built a garden in the structure. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was used as an animal baiting and bullfighting ring before the Pope put a stop to the cruel spectacles. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a concert hall was built on top of the structure where Arturo Toscanini once played Wagner, which outraged his Roman audience. The hall, now removed, is pictured in a photograph on the fence.
All the inscribed plaques that once adorned the monument’s entrance are now preserved next door in the Museo dell’Ara Pacis. Typical of the unfortunate practice of repurposing marble from ancient monuments, the obelisks that once flanked its doors are now in the Piazza del Quirinale and Piazza dell’Esquilino.
Over the last several years, we have watched in our visits to the piazza as workers restored and stabilized the outer wall, which remains much lower than the original. That once earth-choked entrance that I saw in 1973 is now a dramatic reconstructed brick arch, a harbinger of what lies within. In November 2021 the site was finally opened to the public for the first time in decades, and Carole and I rushed to take our first tour. Our tour guide recounted the history of the mausoleum.
Beyond that dramatic doorway arch, like Caracalla and the Pantheon, the interior of the mausoleum is a jaw-dropping example of Roman ingenuity, both ancient and modern. Though lower than they once were, its walls still tower above the visitor. There is evidence of the crypts where emperors and their family members were once buried. Complementing the ancient walls, the modern reconstructed interior is a testimony to Italian restoration, which has preserved this priceless monument for future generations.
But the significance of Piazza Augusto Imperatore does not stop with just the history of the mausoleum. The centuries since have added layers to the piazza. Just to the south of the mausoleum are two churches, the sixteenth-century Chiesa di San Gerolamo dei Croati and the seventeenth-century Chiesa San Rocc’ all’Augusteo. Their newly restored Renaissance and classical revivalist façades add yet another layer to the history of the piazza. Their interiors are worth a studied, contemplative tour. Updating to the twentieth century, to the north and east are two Mussolini-era buildings: their stark white columns speak of Mussolini’s bloated notion of restoring modern Italy to the accomplishments of the Roman Empire. Images on the façades depict an idealized, pastoral Rome, the subject of many nineteenth-century romantic paintings. The white marble columns of the eastern façade are Mussolini’s vainglorious efforts to link his fascist regime to Augustus’s “city of marble.”
The timeline on the fence tells us that Mussolini began the original excavation of the mausoleum. He directed archeologist and architect Antonio Munoz to excavate the mausoleum down to its original Roman level, he then destroyed surrounding nineteenth-century neighborhoods to make space for his own stark façades. Mussolini purportedly once said, “After my death, remove the statue of Augustus and put mine there.” But history had other plans for him and his oppressive fascist regime.
In 2006, adding yet another layer of architectural history to the site, Richard Meier completed the Museo dell’ Ara Pacis on the western flank of the piazza. The Ara Pacis houses the altar to Pax, the goddess of peace, which the senate built in honor of Augustus’s victorious return from Gaul and Spain.
At the time, controversy surrounded the building of a modern structure in the piazza. Its modern design caused a firestorm of protests in Rome and was once even vandalized. But there is no reason to assume that the twenty-first century should not have a place in Rome’s history. In his modern structure, Meier added yet another layer to the piazza’s history and links modern Italy in a creative and effective design with the history of Rome.
In a stunning discovery, only recently archeologists unearthed in the piazza one of the most important Roman finds in decades: the cippus of the pomerium, a Rome boundary marker, laid down by Emperor Claudius. The stone has great cultural significance for the history of Rome, as it defined Roman citizenship and prohibited soldiers from crossing into the city with arms. Historians also add that the placement of the stone extended the city boundaries and corresponds with the expansion of the Roman Empire, which can be credited to Augustus. It is the very marker that defined Roman identity and the rights granted to its citizens.
Adding yet another layer to the piazza, in one of the most extraordinary archeological reconstructions in Rome to date, planners have created a wide staircase that descends hundreds of feet between the two churches to the original level of the mausoleum. The excavation provides a dramatic view of the mausoleum’s entrance, much as it was when it was originally constructed. Not yet completed, this massive project is yet another impressive engineering feat and a beautifully planned restoration of the site. Visitors can see a large rendering of the completed project on the fence. Thus, the twenty-second century has added yet another layer to what I must consider Rome’s most remarkable piazza.
Kenneth Scambray’s most recent book is Italian Immigration in the American West: 1870-1940. Univ. of Nevada Press.
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