Catacombs & Crypts: Underground Rome

Tour stops

1. 1. Case romane del Celio

   Beneath the Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo lies a secret. 🤫 A complex of Roman houses, built over and preserved when the church went up on top of them. Twenty or so rooms survive, with frescoes still on the walls — pagan subjects in some, early Christian in others. ⛪ It shows how people in Rome actually lived, at street level, in the centuries the catacombs were being dug outside the walls.

2. 2. Parco San Sebastiano

   The park is peaceful now. 🌳 Beneath it runs a network of ancient roads and burial galleries. The Appian Way — the regina viarum, queen of roads — was begun in 312 BC and passes through here on its way south. 👑 The catacombs of San Sebastiano and San Callisto are both a short walk from this point, and this is the natural place to start into them.

3. 3. Catacombe di Domitilla

   🕯️ The Catacombs of Domitilla run for some 17 kilometres on four levels and are among the largest and oldest in Rome. They hold an estimated 150,000 burials, and a fourth-century basilica sits underground within them, which the other catacombs do not have. Visits are by guided tour only and it is cold down there whatever the weather above. They are on the Via delle Sette Chiese, a bus ride from the centre.

4. 4. Museo Nazionael Romano, Crypta Balbi

   The Crypta Balbi is the one Roman museum about time rather than about objects. 🏛️ It is built on a single city block that has been continuously occupied since antiquity, and the excavation is displayed as a section through it: a Roman theatre portico, then medieval workshops, then a convent, then tenements. It is the least visited of the four Museo Nazionale Romano sites and the most useful for understanding how the city stacked up on itself.

5. 5. Piazza di San Bernardo

   The square holds the Fontana dell'Acqua Felice, finished in 1587. ⛲ It is the terminal display of an aqueduct restored by Sixtus V — the Romans built the water system, and the popes of the sixteenth century put it back into service and marked the outlets with fountains like this one. The central Moses is generally agreed to be a failure; the sculptor is said to have died of the criticism. Two churches face each other across the square.

6. 6. Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels and the Martyrs (Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri)

   The basilica is built inside the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian. 🌟 The vaulted hall you walk into was the frigidarium, the cold room of the largest baths Rome ever built. Michelangelo drew up the conversion in 1561, in the last year of his life, and left the Roman structure largely as he found it. 🎨 A meridian line runs across the floor, laid in 1702 to check the date of Easter; at solar noon a spot of light crosses it.

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