Rome in the Footsteps of an XVIIIth Century Traveller

The Niobe of nations! there she stands
Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe;
An empty urn within her withered hands,
Whose sacred dust was scattered long ago;
The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now;
The very sepulchres lie tenantless
Of their heroic dwellers: dost thou flow,
Old Tiber ! through a marble wilderness?
Rise, with thy yellow waves, and mantle her distress!
Lord Byron - Childe Harold - Canto the Fourth - LXXIX (Ode to Rome)

The late XVIIIth century monumental entrance to the Tomb of the Scipios in an 1803 drawing by Angelo Uggeri; it shows also the sarcophagus of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus outside it (now at Musei Vaticani)

At this time in the year 1780 there was a rumour in Rome, that the sepulchre of the Scipios which had been the object of so much useless research was at length discovered. This interesting fact made me immediately renounce every other object; for the monuments of great men penetrate the soul that loves the calm of reflection with a pleasing melancholy far preferable to the exultation of gayety and the turbulence of mirth. When night came bringing the silence and obscurity favourable to my design, I repaired to the spot; which is marked by a rustic hovel; thence a narrow and irregular excavation leads to the catacombs. Through this steep and rocky passage, I entered the tomb of the valiant race of the Scipios. The remains of some of them had been disinterred from the earth and ruins, under which others were still buried. I approached them, carrying a flambeau to guide my steps; and by its glimmering light I perceived the mouldering remains mingled together among the stones and the loose earth. Slowly moving my torch around me, I remarked with dissatisfaction and pain the inroads of the spade on these spoils of the grave worthy of being enshrined in sarcophagi of alabaster, but now become toys for the vulgar curious, and the sport of the populace. But learned travellers, attracted to Rome from all parts of the globe, by an enlightened taste for antiquity, had been willing to express a due veneration for these precious relics; and had hastened to gather and transfer some to distant cabinets, as pledges of their respect to the memory of the Scipios. Even foreign ladies of rank on hearing of this discovery had fearlessly exposed their delicate feet to the rugged soil of the cavern; and had touched with their fair and soft hands these crumbling bones; sad evidences of human caducity. As for me I could not avoid feeling a shudder of reluctance to tread under foot the remains of that race of heroes and as I walked to crush perhaps the head or the arm of one of those triumphant sons of victory.
Alessandro Verri (1741-1816) - Roman Nights: Or the Tomb of the Scipios - written in 1782 and completed in 1804 - translation by Henry W. Hilliard

Copy of an inscription which was found in 1614

But before I quit the mural precincts of modern Rome, my natural enthusiasm for historical antiquity will not allow me to pass over in silence the Mausoleum of the Scipios. It remained till of late unknown, though many other ruined sepulchres had been ascribed to that illustrious family. Classical tradition had thrown some light upon its situation which was near the Porta Capena and the following inscription, found in the year 1616, ought to have indicated the precise site of the family burial-place, and encouraged further researches.
Sir Richard Colt Hoare - A Classical Tour through Italy and Sicily - published in 1819, but reporting a journey made in 1789.
Of L. Cornelius, son of Barbatus, Cicero says that were it not for his bad health he should have been not inferiour to his adopted father, for that to the father's greatness of soul he added more learning (De Senectute c. 11). His epitaph says that he was flamen dialis, that is a priest of the first order; and that death prematurely cut off all the hopes conceived of him, honour, fame, valour, glory, genius, merits, which, had he lived longer, he should have exalted above the glory of his ancestors.
Rev. Jeremiah Donovan - Rome Ancient and Modern and its environs - 1842
The discoveries of the seventeenth century have been mentioned by one epigraphist alone, Giacomo Sirmondo. (..) The sarcophagus of L. Cornelius, son of Barbatus, was broken and its inscription sold to a stone-cutter near the Ponte Rotto, in whose shop Grimaldi saw it on September 25, 1614. Agostini bought it for twenty scudi, and sold it to the Barberini, who set it into the wall of the spiral staircase of their palace, near the door of the library.
Rodolfo Lanciani - The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome - 1897

Plan of the tomb from "Rodolfo Lanciani - The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome - 1897" (in black structures of the imperial time which were built above the tomb)

But it was not till the year 1780, that chance discovered this interesting sepulchral chamber, on a little farm situate between the Via Appia and Latina and on the outside of the Porta Capena, where these two ancient ways separated. The circumstances attending this fortunate event are thus related by Piranesi in his general account of this Mausoleum. "Whilst enlarging the souterrains of a casino the labourers discovered two large tablets of peperino marble, with characters engraved and coloured with red; upon which discovery the Pope ordered the researches to be continued at his own expense for the space of a year, during which period, the magnificent sarcophagus of Scipio Barbatus was rescued from obscurity together with many other valuable records of his illustrious family". Colt Hoare
The discovery of the tomb of the Scipios was not an unmingled triumph for the Roman antiquaries. It would not be easy to exemplify more strongly than by this instance, the error and uncertainty of their researches. A fragment of peperine, evidently detached from this vault, with an inscription to Lucius, son of Barbatus Scipio, had been discovered in the year 1615, near the Porta Capena, and was neglected as bad grammar and an evident forgery. The objectors quoted Cicero to prove that the tomb of the Scipios must be without the Porta Capena, and forgot that the Aurelian walls had brought forward that gate beyond the Ciceronian sepulchre. The authenticity of the inscription was not without protectors, but the error balanced the fact, and the epitaph was occasionally quoted as apocryphal, until the accident which uncovered the actual tomb in 1780. Those who had not supported the mistake, could not but be gratified by a discovery so precious both to the philologist and the antiquary, and the happy accident was consigned to immortality in the very eloquent, but rather dull, dialogues of the dead, whom the Conte Verri evoked in those sacred vaults.
John Cam Hobhouse - Dissertations on the Ruins of Rome - 1818

Late XVIIIth century monumental entrance from Via di Porta S. Sebastiano, the urban section of Via Appia (see it in a watercolour by Yoshio Markino, in "The Colour of Rome" by Olave Muriel Potter - 1909)

The brothers Sassi, owners of the vineyard in which the discoveries of 1614 had taken place, while enlarging their wine-cellar in May, 1780, came once more across the hypogeum, and laid bare its precious contents. In reading the accounts left by Morcelli, Marini, Visconti, and Amaduzzi, we cannot understand how such acts of wanton destruction as the brothers Sassi perpetrated on this most venerable of Roman historical tombs could have been permitted or left unpunished by Pius VI, whose love for antique monuments certainly cannot be questioned. The sarcophagi were broken to pieces; their inscribed fronts removed to the Vatican; the aspect of the crypts altered; the movable objects dispersed; the facsimiles of the original epitaphs affixed to the wrong places. (..) And lastly, the very bones of the illustrious men, which had been respected even by the so-called barbarians, would have been dispersed to the four winds, but for the pious interference of Angelo Quirini, a senator of Venice, who rescued the relics of L. Cornelius Scipio, son of Barbatus, and placed them in a marble urn in the Villa dell'Alticchiero, near Padua. A remarkable fate indeed, if we recall to mind the words of Livy (xxxviii. 53): "Scipio spent the last years of his life at Liternum (near Capua), without missing in the least degree the attractions of city life; and, if we are to believe tradition, he left instructions at the point of death to be buried in his farm: "monumentumque ibi aedificari ne funus sibi in ingrata patria fieret." The same mother country, obdurate in her ingratitude, allowed these remains to be dispersed after twenty centuries of rest. Lanciani
We made a pilgrimage to Torre di Patria, - the ancient Liternum; - the retreat and the tomb of Scipio. The word "Patria," is still legible in the wall of a watch-tower, which, you are told, is all that remains of the angry epitaph which he dictated himself: - " Ingrata Patria, nec mea ossa habebis." It is evident however, that this tower is of modern construction, and therefore, the inscription on it only affords evidence of the tradition, that this was the place of Scipio's interment. And this tradition is at least as old as Pliny, who tells as there was a notion, that a dragon watched over the manes of Scipio, in a cavern at Liternum.
Henry Matthews' Diary of an Invalid (in 1817-1818)

(above) Front of a small sarcophagus which was placed at the modern entrance from Via Appia; (below) a sarcophagus which was found in the environs of the tomb

Proceeding along the Via Appia, is the entrance to the Tomb of the Scipios, a small catacomb in the tufa rock, discovered in 1780, from which the famous sarcophagus of L. Scipio Barbatus, and a bust of the poet Ennius, were removed to the Vatican by Pius VII. The contadino at the neighbouring farmhouse provides lights, with which one can visit a labyrinth of steep narrow passages, some of which still retain inscribed sepulchral slabs.
Augustus J. C. Hare - Walks in Rome - 1875
This venerable monument and the ground which covers and surrounds it were bought, on my suggestion, by the city in 1880. They are entered by the Via di Porta S. Sebastiano, No. 12, and can be visited every day, Sundays excepted. Entrance fee, 2.5 centimes. Lanciani
A few hundred yards inside the old gate of the Aurelian Wall, a tall cypress, rising above an archway like the smoke of a funeral pyre on a windless day, marks the tombs of the Scipios. Two columns support the arch, which is adorned on the interior with a beautiful fragment of marble frieze, and a little slope leads up to the open mouth of the tomb, where pepper-trees stand like guardians on either hand.
Olave Muriel Potter - The Colour of Rome - 1909

Interior of the tomb: (left) side gallery; (right) end wall of the tomb with a fragment of the sarcophagus of Aulla Cornelia (see the image used as background for this page) and a cast of the sarcophagus of Barbatus in the place where it was found.

In the Vatican is one of the most interesting objects in Rome - the sarcophagus of gray stone found in the tomb of the Scipios, ..) Half of its significance and meaning is lost by its being thrust upon the eye in the broad glare of noon, and surrounded by such different and exciting objects. How much better would it have been, had it been left in the gloom and silence of the vaulted niche for which it was prepared! How much more impressive would the simple inscription have been, if we had been compelled to spell it out, in sepulchral darkness, by the flickering light of a torch! Then all would have been in harmony: the sombre walls of the tomb; the ashen gray of the sarcophagus; the partial and struggling illumination; the heavy air, and the palpable silence.
George Stillman Hillard - Six Months in Italy in 1847-1848
The hypogeum, roughly modelled on the Etruscan type, formed a large room, with a flat low ceiling supported by four massive pillars of rock. (..) The first occupant was L. Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, consul in 298 b. c. His sarcophagus is the only elaborate piece of work discovered in the tomb. (..) The other sarcophagi were made of thin slabs of stone, or cut out of a single block. (..) The preference shown by the gens Cornelia, of which the Scipios were a branch, for burial as opposed to cremation, is proved by the presence of sarcophagi and by the absence of cinerary urns. The first Cornelius to give up family traditions on this point was Sulla the dictator, who, having caused the remains of Marius to be exhumed and profaned, ordered his own body to be cremated for fear of retaliation. Sulla's ashes were not deposited in this family vault, which seems to have been owned only by the three branches of the Scipios called Africani, Asiatici, and Hispalli. What seems strange, however, is that none of the leaders of the three branches - Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Maior, the conqueror of Carthage, Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus, his brother, and Cn. Cornelius Scipio Hispallus - should have found rest in this tomb. Lanciani
You descend a steep incline into the dark, dark silence of the house of the dead Scipios, whose peperino sarcophagi are white with tears fallen from the tapers of those who come to see the resting-place of the Cornelian gens. Every year they are sprinkled more thickly, as though the world would never tire of weeping over their departed grandeur. The sepulchre is as large as a catacomb, and its network of winding ways holds many of the plain peperino slabs which close the sarcophagi of the house that bred more conquerors than any other Roman family. Potter
You may wish to see the Tomb of the Volumni, which was discovered in the 1840s near Perugia and which shows how the Etruscans had advanced skills in creating underground rock-cut tombs.

Inscription of Cneus Cornelius Scipio Hispanus; (inset) of Scipio Comatus who died at the age of sixteen

These venerable tombs bear in their simplicity the stamp of those better days of the republic; when the Romans sought not to distinguish themselves by vain magnificence; but by the splendour of their virtues. They were built only of coarse stone rough hewn; and the names and actions of the dead are traced simply in red ochre; fortunately yet uninjured. The monumental inscriptions are in the ancient Latin tongue; and modestly record, in a concise style, the famous actions of those deposited within them. Verri
The number of inscriptions found were ten, besides fragments; and they were all on peperino slabs, except two on marble, of the Imperial times. Some of the former consisted merely of red letters written, not cut on the stone. The following inscriptions belong to the branch of the Hispalli or Hispani; and amongst them the first is that of Cneus Cornelius Scipio Hispanus, son of Gneus, who was praetor, curule aedile, quaestor, twice military tribune, decemvir to decide suits, decemvir for sacred ceremonies, to which are added two distichs, purporting that he united hereditary valour to moral integrity, had family, imitated his father, received praise from his ancestors, who were proud to have such a descendant, and that his birth was an honour which had ennobled his race. Donovan
The tombs of the Scipios prove how slowly the language advanced to the perfection it afterwards attained. Indeed, it does not seem to have been a cultivated language till the sixth century U.C. (*) Some other tongue, perhaps the Etruscan, must have maintained a considerable degree of popularity till the middle of the seventh century U.C.; for by the Julian law, public acts were ordered to be in Latin; whence we may infer that till that time, other languages had been employed indifferently with the Latin.
(*) U. C. Urbe Condita Foundation of Rome in 753 BC
Sir William Gell - The topography of Rome and its vicinity - 1834
You may wish to see "Cippo di Perugia", a finely carved Etruscan inscription and a page showing the perfection which Roman inscriptions attained during the Augustan age.

Front of the tomb

The under floor of the tomb served as a basement, which terminated externally in front with a solid frieze of peperino as we shall see when we pass through its ancient entrance; and above the frieze is the order of architecture of which half a column of the same stone and of the Ionic order with an Attic base still remains. Donovan
The part of the ancient cemetery now occupied by the Vigna Sassi was crossed at an early period by a side road, connecting the Via Appia with the Latina, the pavement of which is still visible at the two ends. The road followed the foot of a rocky ridge ten or fifteen feet high, and passed one or more tufa quarries which had been opened in the face of the cliffs. One of these quarries, probably the property of the Scipios, was transformed into their family tomb at the beginning of the third century b.c., probably on the occasion of the opening of the Via Appia. Lanciani
In the 1920s excavations were made to fully unearth the façade of the tomb which in antiquity was visible at a distance by travellers leaving Rome along Via Appia. Today visitors enter the site from the original arched opening and they immediately see the copy of the sarcophagus of Barbatus at the end of the tomb, as shown in the icon of this page.

Elements of the decoration of the façade of the tomb; (inset) assumed aspect of the façade

Tomb of Scipio, in a vineyard near the Porta S. Sebastiano, the most ancient and the most interesting of all the tombs yet discovered. (..) Several recesses or chambers were discovered, irregularly excavated in the tufa, with six sarcophagi and numerous inscriptions. The ancient entrance was found opposite to the modern one, and facing the Via Latina: it has a solid arch constructed of eleven blocks of peperino, resting on half columns of the same material, and supporting a plain moulding. Upon this rests the base of a Doric column, indicating a second story.
John Murray - Handbook for travellers in Central Italy - 1843
Q. Ennius the poet was born at Rudise in Calabria in 289 b.c, and died in Rome at the age of seventy. Although dwelling in a humble house on the Aventine, and supporting himself by teaching the Greek language and translating Greek plays for the Roman stage, he was the friend of the great, and lived on terms of the closest intimacy with the elder Africanus. Livy says that "in Scipionum monumento extra portam Capenam" three statues could be seen, one of which was considered to represent the poet, and Cicero adds that the statue was of marble. A laurel-crowned portrait head in peperino was actually found in the tomb in 1780, and is now placed in the Vatican Museum. The unRoman type of countenance and the presence of the laurel wreath, which might well be worn by a poet, have led many to attribute this head to the statue mentioned by Livy and Cicero. Lanciani
Today archaeologists rule out the opinion that Ennius was portrayed in one of the three statues which were placed on the façade. The initial tomb was soon filled by sarcophagi and another corridor was excavated to the right of the main one in order to house other sarcophagi. The façade reflects the impact of this enlargement.

Façade: fragments of frescoes

The excavations of the 1920s unearthed a fresco decoration in the lower part of the façade. Archaeologists found seven layers of frescoes which suggests that the façade was repainted each time a senior member of the family was buried. The frescoes seem to depict fights and a red decorative motif most likely was a symbolic representation of the sea. It has been put in relation with Lucius Cornelius Barbatus who was son to the elder Barbatus, consul, censor, aedile , conqueror of Corsica, and who dedicated a temple to the Tempests, because he and his fleet had nearly been lost in a tempest off Corsica.
The family of the Scipios being extinct, throughout its different branches, the sepulchre passed to the Cornelii Cossi, who were allied to the Cornelii Lentuli; and who, by adoption, succeeded to one of the Junii Silani, that is to Decimus, who is mentioned by Tacitus as having been exiled for having committed adultery with the niece of Augustus, but returned to Rome under Tiberius A. D. 20. Donovan
In the IIIrd century AD a large and tall brick building (most likely an insula) was erected above the tomb, and in the course of time it was turned into a farmhouse.

Columbarium: (left) central pillar; (right-above) decorative fresco (see those of another columbarium); (right-below) space for inscription

In 1927 a small columbarium was discovered between the Tomb of the Scipios and Via Appia. A columbarium is a tomb resembling a dovecot because of its many niches which housed cinerary urns. It was not meant for a family, but most likely, similar to a modern ossuary, its niches could be bought separately. Archaeologists were puzzled by finding out that it had never been used as there were no cinerary urns inside it and no names were written in the spaces which were painted to this purpose.

View of the archaeological site in 2024 with the stairs leading down to the columbarium and behind them the ancient and medieval buildings which were erected above the tomb

The Classics have lately lost so much ground in schools and universities that an educated person is now no longer expected to know (for instance) who Deucalion may have been.
Robert Graves - The Greek Myths - Penguin Books 1955.
What Robert Graves wrote in 1955 is even truer today and it applies to Roman history too. Travellers of the past were familiar with the works of Livy, Ovid, Cicero, etc. and understood the historical importance of Scipio Africanus, Scipio Asiaticus, Scipio Emilianus and of the other members of that family and their connections with the Cornelii and the Gracchi. Potter wrote that every year the sarcophagi are sprinkled more thickly, as though the world would never tire of weeping over their departed grandeur. He might have gone too far in depicting how visitors were moved by the sight of the tombs; it is highly unlikely a modern visitor would need to wipe his/her tears. Since 1780 many other underground Roman monuments have been discovered e.g. the Basilica near Porta Maggiore, the Lower Church and mithraeum of S. Clemente, the inner halls of Domus Aurea and many others.
Because of the need to protect the tomb and in particular the columbarium a maximum of twelve people at a time can attend a guided visit which must be booked in advance.