The complex of buildings in the center of Rossi’s cemetery, however, is not found in the 19th century cemeteries of the Modena/Genoa type. That idea came from another source, Giovanii Battista Piranesi’s reconstruction of the Campo Marzio in Rome, as he imagined it stood in late imperial times. In Piranesi’s map, a large part of the right bank of the Tiber is occupied by a group of funerary monuments dominated by the mausoleum of Hadrian, which we now know as Castel Sant’Angelo. Hadrian’s tomb sits on a square base near the river. Beyond this square is a U-shaped group of buildings marked Sepulchra. They embrace the bottom of a fan-shaped structure designated by the word clitoporticus. At the apex of the fan sits a round building called Basilica. This latter forms part of a group of monuments labeled Bustum Hadriani, designating the place where cremation occurs. The correspondence in general layout between Piranesi and the Rossi is too close to be accidental. Rossi, who knows this Piranesi perfectly well (a fragment of it appears in Rossi’s drawing The Analogous City, 1976), has lifted Piranesi’s vision of an Imperial ancient city of the dead placed within the context of Rome, and put it in the middle of a 19th-century cemetery plan. 

Eugene J. Johnson, “What Remains of Man—Aldo Rossi’s Modena Cemetery” in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (March 1982), pp. 40-42.