This painting is a classical landscape with overgrown ruins standing to both right and left of the composition allowing a view between them of a distant walled town. Several groups and couples inspect the ruins. The tomb depicted in the foreground – a columbarium from the Augustan period – was a favourite place to visit for aristocratic travellers on the Grand Tour. The inscription on the right imitates the one which appears on the edge of the tomb, added in 1544 by the Canonici Regolari Lateranensi from the nearby church of Santa Maria di Piedigrotta. The same topographical view can be found in a small, eighteenth-century oil painting on copper (now belonging to the Museum of San Martino) by Clerissau and Antonio Dominici; the latter signed and dated the work 1784.