It was built during the 1st century BC to honor Caecilia Metella, who was the daughter of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Creticus, a consul in 69 BC, and the wife of Marcus Licinius Crassus who served under Julius Caesar and was the son of the famous triumvir with the same name, Marcus Licinius Crassus.

In 2013, the museum circuit of the Baths of Caracalla, Villa of the Quintilii, and the Tomb of Caecilia Metella was the twenty-second most visited site in Italy, with 245,613 visitors and a total gross income of €883,344.

[5] Located on top of a hill along the Via Appia, the Tomb of Caecilia Metella consists of a cylindrical drum, or rotunda, atop a square podium with the Caetani Castle (Castrum) attached at the rear.

The Roman concrete was made up of semi-liquid mortar and aggregate, which consisted of broken pieces of stone or bricks.

The mortar utilized the lava rock quarried from beneath the monument as an additive or substitute for sand in the concrete.

The interior of the Tomb of Caecilia Metella can be separated into 4 sections: the cella, the upper and lower corridors, and the west compartment.

The upper section of the rotunda is decorated quite minimally with a marble frieze of bucrania, oxen heads, and garlands.

Decorations were very popular on funerary altars and votive offerings and the most famous example are identified in the frieze of carved ox skulls and festoons on the inside of the fence.

Today, there is a marble sarcophagus located in Palazzo Farnese that is purportedly from the Tomb of Caecilia Metella.

Between 1302 and 1303, the Caetani, or Gaetani, family aided by Pope Boniface VIII bought the estate of Capo di Bove, which was all the land surrounding and including the Tomb of Caecilia Metella, and built a fortified camp, or castrum, next to the tomb replacing a preceding 11th century building.

[7] Lord Byron wrote about visiting the tomb in canto 4 of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a long semi-autobiographical narrative poem about travelling around southern Europe and the Mediterranean.

In The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins, Laura Fairlie and Sir Percival Glyde ride out together to "the tomb of Cecilia Metella" one day whilst honeymooning in Italy.