The St Angel Castle was originally the Hadrian's mausoleum (as you read in the article before), but now it is time to find out why the ancient mausoleum of the emperor is today known with this name. Why an angel? And which angel is?
Today we are attracted by the bronze statue of an angel placed on the top of the building, in the act of relining the sword. Why? Here's the story, as well as is handed down to us from historical sources. We are at the 590 a.D., and shortly after his election, Pope Gregory the Great had to cope with a dire emergency: an epidemic, he was flailing Rome, filling the Eternal City with corpses, famines and plagues that seemed to have no end. The Pope, one of the first pontiffs of the story to really take the reins of the city's administrative, do not lose heart. After all, he was a capable man, if it is true that he abandoned a brilliant political career to embrace the world of clerical, reaching even to be pope!
On September 3rd of that year he decided to organize a grand procession which would pass through the main streets of the city, to ask God for the grace to end the epidemic. The chronicles tell us how the procession attended by thousands of people but, also, of how the weather conditions didn't help it. The plague also added a great heat, which led to the death of 80 faithful as they were, with hope, participating in the procession. Joints in the middle of the Ponte Elio, a structure which still today takes us to the castle, here Gregory the Great, and all the crowd got astonished. From the top of what for them was the Hadrian's Mausoleum they saw the Archangel Michael surrounded dazzling light, in the act of relining his sword by the blade burning. Once the rifle was fully in the scabbard, the epidemic ceased, and Rome was able to breathe and survive. This is the reason why, still today, the fortress and the bridge are defined by the Angel.
But now we let me tell you a story even more curious. it is since the XV century that the fortress has an angel on its summit: it was Pope Nicholas V, in fact, that commissioned an angel in marble with golden wings. Unfortunately, however, in 1497, a bolt of lightning struck the sculpture, which was replaced in 1544 by Raffaello da Montelupo, at the behest of Pope Paul III. Also this second version, and twice, was destroyed by lightning and later replaced. The statue survived until 1752, when the Pope Benedict XIV, in a visit to the castle, he saw that the opera was in poor condition. The following year, therefore, a new sculpture was inaugurated, in bronze, designed by Peter Anton van Verschaffelt. The sculpture is still visible to the millions of tourists who visit the monument annually, perhaps unaware of the real motivations for an angel, better an archangel, is still the protagonist of the place. So you can understand why it symbolizes this amazing monuments that became one of the main landmarks of the roman landscape, a monument that, I'm sure, was able to be a witness of the long history of Rome (and if you want to know in what way try to click here).