The Mausoleum of the Plauzi (or Plautii) in Tivoli, along the Via Tiburtina at Lucano Bridge, on the left bank of the Aniene River, is the most famous ancient tomb in the Roman Campagna after the coeval tomb of Cecilia Metella on the Appian Way.
He belonged to the senatorial gens of the Plautii Silvani, originally from Trebula Suffenas (now Ciciliano, a small town upstream from Tivoli), who had their
springboard in Rome, where they were on close terms with the court of Augustus and remained in vogue until the second century AD.
The mausoleum was built by M. Plautius Silvanus, consul together with Augustus in 2 B.C., for himself, his wife Lartia , and their son A. Plautius Urgulanius, but it received the remains of other illustrious descendants, as evidenced by inscriptions still extant on the site or found in the past, for example the one with the long cursus honorum (career) of T. Plautius Silvanus Aelianus, consul in 45 and 74 A.D.
The cylindrical mole made of travertine blocks (extracted from the nearby Barco quarry, the same one that supplied the stone for the Colosseum), highly developed in height, transformed into a fortress in the 12th century and into a keep around 1465, is only a part of the monument, since it stands on a parallelepiped base, which encloses the burial cell.
Surrounding the cylinder was an enclosure of travertine aediculae, separated by Corinthian columns, in which marble inscriptions were inserted, as is the case in Hadrian’s Mausoleum (Castel Sant’Angelo); in fact, it is very likely that the emperor, who had built his residence not far from the Lucan Bridge, had been inspired by this Mausoleum for the construction of his tomb on the Aelius Bridge along the Tiber in Rome.
Today, after the restoration started in 2019, the Mausoleum appears in the architectural form it took when it became a fortress, with the crenellated crowning and the elegant flat ashlar of travertine blocks of the cylindrical mole, at the center of the newly created archaeological park.
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