This first section is a brief explanation of my Italy blog posts, which were inspired by my 2-week trip to Italy in May, 2025. Feel free to skip this section if you’ve read it before.
Dear Reader, If you read my Italy posts in the order in which they’ve come out, it may seem as though we hopped back and forth all over the country, but I have decided not to write these posts sequentially. I want to write about the things that interest me most, as the spirit moves me. For some topics, I may even combine cities. I hope that by doing so, you’ll find it a lot more interesting than if I just give you a tedious day by day description of our itinerary, as if I were your Aunt Mabel forcing you to sit down and watch all her Super 8 films of the family road trip to Niagara Falls from 1966.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about how I’m approaching this travelogue-within-a-blog, please let me know in the comments below!
Several weeks ago, I wrote about our visit to the Ancient Appian Way in Rome. It’s one of the oldest, most important roads that the Roman Republic built, and parts of it still exist. I was really excited to experience this road myself. It was something I had been dreaming about since childhood.
That first post describes much of our visit in detail, but it left one stop out, because it was just too significant to have to share its spotlight with any other part of our visit. At the time I called it the crown jewel of the Appian Way, and promised to write more about it in a subsequent post. Well, the time has come.
At mile 3 in the Parco Archeologico Dell’Appia Antica, it’s impossible to miss the Mausoleum of Cecilia Metella and the Caetani Castle. While the two buildings are attached, they were built at extremely different times for extremely different people. And today, there is still more to this monument than meets the eye, thanks to excellent management.
The exterior, today, is encrusted with various architectural elements found during excavation of the site. I think it gives it a certain come-hither look that its modern façade, shorn of its lovely travertine, with its ugly concrete and brick exposed for all to see, does not provide. I wasn’t intimidated by this place. I was dying to go in. (Well played, Italy. Well played.)
The Mausoleum is the third largest in Rome, and it was built in the drum style. It has a square base, then a cylinder, and it was originally topped by a cone. It was deliberately placed at the highest point on the Via Appia and could be seen from miles around. Even though the road was lined with tombs on either side, this one would have stood out.
It was built sometime between 30 and 20 BC to house the remains of Cecilia Metella. We know very little about her personally. We do know she was born around 100 BC, but we don’t know what she looked like or when or how she died. Due to the large plaque outside the mausoleum, we know that she was the daughter of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Creticus and the wife of Marcus Licinius Crassus. We also know she had at least one son, and that he was the one who built the mausoleum for her.
The Caecilii Metelli family was one of the richest families in all of the Roman Republic from 300 BC to around 10 BC. During that time, two family members were dictators, 5 were censors, 12 were consuls, several were generals and at least one was a pontifex. This was an influential family.
With a pedigree like that, our Cecilia Metella married quite well. (And I say “our” because by Roman custom, all women in that branch of the family were named Cecilia Metella, which, I’m sure, makes it fun for both historians and family gatherings.) It was most likely a marriage of political expediency rather than one of love. Her husband was the son of Marcus Licinius Crassus (same name as her husband, since he was the first-born son. Again, confusing), who was part of the first Roman Triumvirate, as was Julius Caesar. (To grossly oversimplify, that means her father-in-law was the ruler of 1/3rd of the Roman Empire.)
So I suppose it’s not surprising, by Roman standards, that one woman would get an entire gigantic mausoleum to herself. But talk about excessive. Originally, including its square base, the monument was 85 feet tall. Today, about 62 feet of it still stands. Feel free to follow me in.
The cylinder had a hollow center (think vertical tube) that used to be topped by an oculus. At the bottom was the chamber where the funeral urn once stood. Before it was stolen, that is.
Today, when you walk into the tomb, you are treated to a video projected on the opposite wall of the tube. It’s an actress depicting a somber-faced Cecilia in nun-like garb talking about her illustrious family and what little is known about her. It’s a haunting presentation, and it gives you chills. I’m sure she never imagined her tomb would be used in this manner, but she has definitely been remembered long after anyone has a right to expect to be, so hopefully she is at peace.
Before discussing the castle, let me describe some of the displays therein. As I mentioned earlier, the Appian Way used to be crowded with elaborate tombs, the majority of which, unfortunately, have not survived. A lot of looting took place in the Middle Ages. But archeologists did find bits and pieces of these tombs here and there, and at some point it was decided that this monument would be a perfect place to display them. I tend to agree.
Having just emerged from a tomb, I was in a tomb-like frame of mind, so it was interesting to look at all the various architectural elements that have been discovered along the road, and take note of the ways styles changed over time. On display were columns, capitals, cornices, friezes, entablatures, funerary statues, stele, reliefs, sculptures, and other ornamental elements.
It also showed how Roman funerary customs changed through the ages. On display were urns for holding ashes, sarcophagi (which I discovered, to my shock, means ‘flesh-eater’), for bodies buried above ground, and bodies were also buried below ground. It is believed that Cecelia Metella was in an urn which was subsequently carried off and is probably sitting in someone’s garden now, having been there so long that its provenance has been forgotten. (Handy hint: If you don’t want your grave robbed, you may want to consider not building an edifice around it that all but screams, “potential treasure inside!”)
Below the display of architectural elements is an underground room called the antiquarium, and down there you are treated to a video projected on the far wall that tells you a little bit about the history of the Appian way, starting with the geology of the area going back to the volcanic eruption that provided the lava rock that was eventually used to build the road. (The Latium Volcano in the mountain system known as the Colli Albani erupted between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene.)
The video discusses the well-thought-out drainage system the Romans put under the road, and goes into great detail about the surface paving that has managed to hold up to the present day. The Romans took advantage of natural fissures in the volcanic rock by carving grooves from fissure to fissure, and then pounding wedges into the fissures to break the rock into more manageable pieces, hopefully along the groove lines.
The video went on to say that the Appian Way began to be associated with prominent Roman families due to their large funerary monuments and also their villas which lined the road. Around the 4th Century, though, the land in the area became private property of the church either through purchase or donation, and it was transformed into a vast agricultural estate, the proceeds of which were filtered back into the church coffers.
Toward the end of the 13th century, though, when Rome was considered part of the Papal State, papal power and influence was beginning to wane, and that was never so evident as it became during the time of Pope Boniface VIII, from 1295-1303. This was an evil, corrupt man. He enters our story because it is his despicable influence that allowed Caetani Castle to be built in the first place.
And that, Dear Reader, is such a fascinating story that I will continue it in the next Italy post.j
Sources:
Check out this virtual tour of the mausoleum and the castle that allows you to wander through in all its three dimensional glory!
A short Youtube Video of the site.
Wikipedia–Caecilii Metelli family tree
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