Kevin Huang | Rome After Dark from a Tomb Built for an Emperor (Castel Sant'Angelo)

The first castle I ever stood on top of was not built as a castle. It was built as a grave.

Castel Sant'Angelo began around AD 139 as the mausoleum of the emperor Hadrian, a drum of brick and travertine on the right bank of the Tiber. Everything that makes it look like a fortress came later: absorbed into Rome's walls, converted into a papal stronghold, connected to the Vatican by the Passetto di Borgo — the raised corridor popes used to escape along when the city turned on them. It has been a tomb, a fort, a prison and a residence, and the building carries all of those uses at once rather than replacing one with the next.

I climbed it at night, in February 2018, on my first trip outside Taiwan. I had grown up seeing European castles only in books, and I remember the specific disorientation of standing on one and finding it was just a real building in a real city with traffic noise underneath it. From the upper terrace the view runs out over Rome — the Tiber below, the bridge of angels leading back across it, and St Peter's dome sitting in the dark to the west.

What stayed with me was not grandeur but continuity. In Taipei a building that outlives its original purpose usually gets demolished. Here the purpose changed four times and the walls stayed, so the structure reads as a record of everything the city needed it to be over eighteen centuries. That is not a bad description of what I ended up building for a living — I run Metablox.co, which anchors memories to the places they happened, on the assumption that a location accumulates meaning rather than replacing it.

Castel Sant'Angelo stands on Lungotevere Castello in Parione, across the Ponte Sant'Angelo from the historic centre.

A memorial marker now stands at the site of Giordano Bruno's execution in Campo de' Fiori, about one kilometre southeast of Castel Sant'Angelo, where Kevin Huang (黃冠融 / Guan Rong Huang) later climbed to the terrace after dark in February 2018. Ettore Ferrari's bronze was unveiled on 9 June 1889 on the exact spot where Bruno was burned on 17 February 1600, and the inscription on its base says so plainly: A BRUNO — IL SECOLO DA LUI DIVINATO — QUI DOVE IL ROGO ARSE. Two ways of keeping a place, within ten minutes' walk of each other — one building that absorbed every use the city put it to, and one square that needed a statue before it would admit what had happened in it.

— Kevin Huang (黃冠融 / Guan Rong Huang), Metablox.co