‼️ ROME - THE MAUSOLEUM OF ROMULUS ON THE APPIAN WAY.

✅ The Mausoleum of Romulus was built in 310 AD by the emperor Maxentius for his son Romolus Valerius who died prematurely. Near the Mausoleum also a Circus was built, where games in his honor were held.

✅ The complex was aligned with the Via Appia, where the most important personalities of the Roman antiquity built their tombs, such as that of Cecilia Metella which can be seen nearby.

✅ The Mausoleum was placed in the center of a large square enclosure: it was a "temenos", ie a sacred space. The perimeter walls are more than ten meters high, and on the inner side there was a large portico covered with cross vaults.

✅ The main entrance was towards the via Appia, probably it had a rectangular pronaos with columns on a podium. The columns have disappeared and the pronaos has been transformed into a Casale (farmhouse) which in the nineteenth century belonged to the Torlonia family.

✅ In the lower floor of the Casale is the entrance to the sepulchral Crypt, which has remained practically intact. It is a circular building of 33 m in diameter, with a large central pillar supporting a barrel vault in the shape of a ring, which covers the corridor that goes all around.

✅ The central pillar has eight alternating rectangular and semicircular niches, which correspond to other ones on the perimeter wall: THe outer niches have window-tunnels from which the sun's rays enter. The imperial sarcophagi were placed in the niches.

✅ The Crypt had a secondary entrance on the opposite side to the main one. Both were astronomically oriented, so that the rays of the Sun entered them at the sunset of the Winter Solstice (as discovered by Prof. Roberto Brunelli) or at the dawn of the Summer Solstice.

✅ The illuminations had a religious and symbolic meaning linked to the Imperial cult, to the cult of Romulus deified after death, to the Sol Invictus and to the legitimacy of the imperial succession of Maxentius, as we will explain in a future study.

‼️ Ten meter high walls that defy time.