Roman tombs

This type is for a single tomb monument: a mausoleum, a free-standing building enclosing the burial chamber of one person or several. A cemetery with many graves is filed as a necropolis instead. The word comes from the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Smaller mausoleums soon became popular with the well-to-do, and in the Roman Empire they often stood in cemeteries or along the roads.

Roman law usually kept the dead outside the city, so cemeteries and tombs lined the roads leading out of a town, and the Via Appia Antica outside Rome is still bordered for kilometres by the ruins of private mausoleums. A tomb was protected ground: a place where a body lay belonged to the gods of the dead, and both religious and civil law guarded it.

The largest tombs had long later lives. In Rome the mausoleum Hadrian built for himself and his family, between 134 and 139, received the ashes of later emperors too, the last recorded in 217, and later became a fortress and the popes’ castle, Castel Sant’Angelo. Entries of this type aim to tell you which part of a monument is the Roman tomb and which came after, whether you can go inside, and what of its decoration is on site and what is in a museum.