Sant'Angelo
You’re at Castel Sant’Angelo—*Mausoleo di Adriano*—and it starts with a tomb, not a castle. The Roman emperor Hadrian commissioned it as a mausoleum, with construction beginning around 123 and the building rising between 134 and 139 AD on the right bank of the Tiber. Hadrian’s story is written into the timing: his ashes arrived about a year after his death in Baiae in 138, alongside his wife Sabina and his first adopted son Lucius Aelius. After that, other emperors were interred here too, with the last recorded deposition being Caracalla in 217. By 401, the mausoleum’s contents and decorations began to suffer as the structure shifted into a military fortress, and by 410 Visigoth looters scattered the urns during Alaric’s sack of Rome. Later, in 537, bronze and stone statuary was thrown down during the Gothic siege. Even the name gives you a twist: it’s named after Archangel Michael, and today it’s a museum. …
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