Mausoleum of Augustus site features

The drum

Ninety metres across and forty-two high, in concentric rings of earth and brick faced with travertine. Visible in full from the piazza without entering anything.

The obelisks that are no longer here

Twin pink granite obelisks flanked the arched entrance. One now stands at Piazza dell'Esquilino, on the north-west side of Santa Maria Maggiore; the other at the Quirinal fountain. Both are free to see and both are a short walk away.

The Res Gestae, next door

Two pillars at the mausoleum's entrance carried bronze plaques inscribed with the Res Gestae Divi Augusti. The text is now mounted on the wall of the Museum of the Ara Pacis, immediately adjacent and open — which is the nearest thing to seeing this building's front door as it was meant to be read.

Who was inside

Marcus Claudius Marcellus, first to be buried there in 23 BCE; Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa; Nero Claudius Drusus; Octavia Minor, Augustus's sister; and his grandsons Gaius and Lucius Caesar.

The Augusteo

For the early twentieth century the interior was a concert hall. Mussolini closed it in the 1930s. Nothing of it survives, which is itself a thing worth knowing while looking at an empty Roman drum.

The Fascist piazza

The square around the mausoleum is a 1930s construction, built to isolate the monument and to tie the regime to Augustus. The setting is as much a historical artefact as the tomb.