One of the reasons we chose to stay in this part of Rome is that it’s a great place to see the trajectory of Christianity from minor cult in pagan Rome to state religon of an empire. Over a couple of days we walked between a series of buildings that illuminate this period of history.
Travel Tip – Don’t, as we did, try to visit the churches on the last Saturday of Spring because they’ll have weddings going on!
Santa Croce in Gerusalemme was founded in 329 by Saint Helena, Empress of the Roman Empire and mother of the Emperor Constantine the Great who legalised Christianity in 313. Helena had a church constructed to house relics she brought back from the Holy Land. It is said that these included three chunks of Christ’s cross, a nail, two thorns from his crown, and the finger that a doubtful Saint Thomas thrust into Christ’s wound. As well as a bunch of soil from Jerusalem. Quite a haul, and one that sparked something of a craze in relic hunting.
When we first visited Rome, one of the things that struck us was how layered it is. Rome seems to have been continuously built on top of itself over time and the modern city stands well above many of the ancient ruins. The Basilica of San Clemente is an excellent place to see this, with a 12th C church built on top of a 4th C church that was razed by the Normans in 1084, built on top of an insula (apartment building) destroyed in the Great Fire of 64 AD. The oldest buildings are almost 20 metres below the newest ones. Saint Clement was the fourth Pope, exiled by the Emperor Trajan for his preaching and eventually drowned in the Black Sea with an anchor tied around him. No photos are allowed inside San Clemente.
We walked along an ancient Roman road called the Clivio Scauro to the San Gregorio Magno, a Baroque church built on the site where Pope Gregory I lived (r. 590 – 604). The building was closed when we visited with a sign saying there was no entry until the Fire Brigade said it was safe. That didn’t sound promising. Next stop was Santa Maria in Domnica to which the locals add ‘alla Navicella’ or ‘little ship’ because of the Roman ship statue that stands outside. The site used to house Roman firefighters (vigiles) then a chuch was built in the 7th C and remodelled in the 9th C with a lovely apse mosaic.
Santi Quattro Coronati is an ancient basilica dating back to the 4th C devoted to four anonymous martyrs. It’s set in a lovely part of Rome which is relatively quiet and green. Like San Clemente and others it was razed by the Normans then rebuilt as a fortified monastery albeit to smaller dimensions. The much larger original apse is still visible from the outside. It has a lovely cloister dating to 1220.
The Archbasilica of San Giovanni in Laterano is the cathedral church of Rome. It is said to be the oldest public church in the city and the oldest basilica of the Western world. You wouldn’t necessarily know it however. There are few traces left of its origins from 313, and subsequent rebuilding and restoration has been fairly unsubtle. The fifteen 7-metre high statues out front telegraph the intentions.
The basilica of Santa Pudenziana stands on a site where a church was first built in the 4th C. It’s also been continuously restored and remodelled though the apse mosaic from the early 5th C remains.
The basilica Santa Prassede dates from the 9th C and has excellent mosaics, considered to be the finest expression of Byzantine art in Rome.
Our last stop was the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. It has an impressive Baroque facade that shrouds a basilica church from the 5th C with some impressive mosaics.
Taken as a whole this walking tour gave us a great sense of how Rome continued to be built, razed, rebuilt, restored, over and over again according to the dominant belief system of the day. It’s quite a history.
We spent a day exploring Ravenna’s World Heritage Early Christian Monuments. Stepping off the train from Bologna you wouldn’t guess that you were walking into a place that has played a signifcant role in European history. Modern Ravenna is unprepossessing at first impression. Stepping off the modern streets and into the ancient churches, baptistries, and mausoleums presents an entirely different picture. You are blasted by a quantity and quality of art and architecture befitting a place that was capital of the Western Roman Empire, capital of the Ostrogothic Kingdom, and a base for reuniting the Eastern and Western Roman Empires under Justinian the Great and his wife Theodora. Ravenna remained an exarchate or lordship of the Eastern Roman / Byzantine Empire until it was captured by the Lombards in 751.
This ‘time capsule’ exists in part because of natural processes. Ravenna used to lay about four kilometres inland from its ancient port at Classe. The port silted up and by the 10th C Ravenna was literally a back water. Over time siltation has moved the coastline a further nine kilometers east and Classe now is far from the coast. This greatly benefited the city of Venice with its access to the Adriatic. Yet it also helped to preserve the remarkable buildings and mosaics of Ravenna that were protected by irrelevance and inaccessibility.
We started at the Arian Baptistry which has an incredible dome mosaic of Christ being baptised by John the Baptist, surrounded by twelve Apostles. It was commissioned by the Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great around the year 500. Theodoric was an Arian Christian and decided to let the Goths (Arians) and the Orthodox Christians co-exist albeit in separate neighborhoods with separate religious buildings.
Next stop was the Basilica di Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, built around the same time as the Arian Baptistry. Along one wall a procession of 26 female martyrs is shown leaving the town to follow the Magi who bear gifts for the Virgin. On the other wall a line of male martyrs leave Theodoric’s palace to honour Christ. It’s a mesmerising sight.
After the poet Dante Aligheri was exiled from Florence his wanderings eventualy led him to Ravenna where he completed his great poem The Divine Comedy before dying in 1321. We visited Dante’s Tomb which sits within a small neoclassical monument next to the Basilica of San Francesco. [Having visited Dante’s Tomb in 2009, it was interesting to visit Alfredo Jaar’s ‘The Divine Comedy’ at MONA, our local museum, in 2019. Not sure if it’s significant but Jaar’s interpretation of Hell was by far our favourite.]
The Neonian Baptistry is named after Archbishop Neon who commissioned its mosaics around 485. The building is a converted Roman bathhouse which is octagonal in shape. It also has a dome mosaic of Christ being baptised. Four of its eight walls bear mosaics of altars and the other four bear mosaics of empty thrones symbolising ‘preparing of the throne’ for Jesus to deliver the last judgement.
01 Arian Baptistry
02 Dome mosaic
03 Dome mosaic detail
04 Sant'Apollinare
05 female martyrs
06 Christ
07 wall and ceiling
08 San Francisco
9 Dante's Tomb
10 Neonian Baptistry
11 Dome mosaic
12 Empty throne mosaic
It’s easy to overdo the superlatives in describing Ravenna’s treasures, but the Basilica di San Vitale is probably the highest of the highlights. The combination of greens, blues and gold is startling, and the mosaics of Justinian and Theodora make them seem surprisingly human.
Next to San Vitale is the small Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. Galla Placidia led an amazing life. She was daughter of the Emperor Theodoius I, half-sister of the Emperor Honorius, held hostage by then married to King Athaulf becoming Queen of the Visigoths, and Regent of the Western Roman Empire when Honorius died hierless, ruling for 13 years in the name of her son Valentinian III. Her mausoleum is appropriately spectacular, though in a final twist she’s actually buried in Rome.
Across the railway lines and surrounded by parkland stands the Mausoleum of Theodoric. It’s an austere monument built in 520 out of Istrain stone and assembled without mortar. The roof alone is a single slab weighing over 300 tonnes and enormous effort must have been required to transport the material to Ravenna then construct the building. Inside is a beautiful Roman porphyry basin which was recycled as a sarcophagus. Theodoric was a Germanic warrior who, around the year 488, brought over 100,000 people across the Alps and into Italy after their homeland was overrun by the Huns. His mausoleum provides a fascinating link between the Roman empire, the Barbarian invasions, and the Byzantine empire. It seemed the perfect way to end an amazing day.
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