Piramide di Caio Cestio

The Soprintendenza Speciale dates the tomb between 18 and 12 BC: the sumptuary law of 18 BC stopped the heirs placing valuable tapestries in the chamber, and Agrippa, named among the beneficiaries of the will, died in 12 BC. Cestius, a member of the priestly college of the epulones, required in his will that the work be finished in 330 days. The core is concrete faced with brick, with an outer skin of Luna marble. The burial chamber measures about 23 square metres, is barrel-vaulted and was walled up at the burial; it was frescoed in panels with nymphs alternating with lustral vases, and four winged Victories at the angles of the vault. The pyramid was taken as a bastion into the circuit built at Aurelian's initiative between 272 and 279. A medieval tunnel driven in from the north violated the tomb, and the cinerary urn was lost. In the Middle Ages the monument was identified as the meta Remi, paired with the meta Romuli, and Petrarch repeated the attribution. The excavations of Alexander VII, from 1660 to 1663, reopened the chamber and found it empty, recovered the two inscribed statue pedestals around 1662 and re-erected two corner columns; a project by Borromini to turn the chamber into a church came to nothing. A nineteenth-century lightning strike brought down the apex and a conductor was fitted. The chamber was restored in 2001 and a further restoration ran from 2012 to 2015. At the end of the PNRR intervention the Soprintendenza Speciale listed the access staircase made safe, the garden's planting surveyed and monitored, new lighting, and new interpretive and welcome panels for accessibility.