Castel Sant'Angelo: from Hadrian's Mausoleum to the Archangel

On the right bank of the Tiber, facing the bridge adorned with Bernini's angels, rises a huge stone cylinder crowned by the statue of an archangel holding a sword. Castel Sant'Angelo has been an imperial tomb, fortress, papal residence, prison and finally a museum. No other Roman building has changed its function so many times, and every age has left a legend there, from the heavenly apparition that gave it its name to the stories of the prisoners locked within.

The tomb of a poet emperor

The emperor Hadrian had the mausoleum built for himself and his family; it was completed in 139, after his death, by his successor Antoninus Pius. The great drum, originally clad in marble and crowned with a garden and statues, received the ashes of the emperors down to Caracalla. A bridge, today's Ponte Sant'Angelo, linked the tomb to the Campus Martius.

Tradition attributes to Hadrian a few lines composed on his deathbed, addressed to his own soul: «Animula vagula blandula, hospes comesque corporis». The little wandering soul, guest and companion of the body, prepares to leave the light. These lines, handed down by an ancient biography, give the mausoleum a melancholy and personal tone that is rare in imperial monuments.

The apparition of the archangel

In 590 Rome was struck by a severe plague. According to tradition, recorded also in the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, Pope Gregory the Great led a penitential procession through the city. On reaching the mausoleum, he is said to have seen the archangel Michael on its summit sheathing his sword, a sign that the scourge was about to end. From then on the building took the name of Castel Sant'Angelo.

Several statues of the angel have followed one another on the summit. The marble one by Raffaello da Montelupo, from 1544, is now displayed in an inner courtyard, while the bronze angel we see today was made in 1753 by the Flemish sculptor Peter Anton von Verschaffelt. The scene of the apparition is one of the great themes of Roman devotion and of the bond between the city and its heavenly protectors.

Fortress of the popes and prison

In the Middle Ages the mausoleum became a fortress. In 1277 it was linked to the Vatican by the Passetto di Borgo, a raised corridor along the walls, through which Pope Clement VII escaped during the Sack of Rome in 1527. In the following centuries the popes created decorated apartments there, while the lower levels held dreaded prisons.

Among its famous prisoners were the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, who escaped in 1538 by lowering himself on knotted sheets and told the tale in his autobiography, the alchemist Giuseppe Francesco Borri, who died here in 1695, and Count Cagliostro, held between 1789 and 1791. Not far away, in front of the bridge, Beatrice Cenci was executed in 1599, and legend has it that her ghost returns there every year.

Climbing to the terrace of Castel Sant'Angelo means retracing almost nineteen centuries of history in a few floors. From the tomb of an emperor bidding farewell to his soul to the statue of an archangel ending the plague, the castle tells of the way Rome has always woven together power, faith and imagination.