On Monday, we wished to visit the catacombs. Probably appropriate on Hallowe'en. But in all seriousness, our trip to Rome was to coincide with All Saints/All Souls, to which the Eve of All Hallows is intimately connected. However, I could see at first hand how the American version of the festival has caught on in Rome. But that's for later in the day.
The first thing we tried to do was go to the Pantheon. This worked and we saw the tombs of Raphael and the Italian kings. The structure is impressive enough in its own right, as a former Roman temple in continuous use as a church and now, a national monument. The distinctive feature is the open cupola. So we took the time to admire the building before moving on to the Gesù for Mass.
When we had been in the Gesù the evening before, there was a statue of St Ignatius Loyola which we could no longer find. There seemed to be a painting in its place. When we got back home, we discovered the answer to this riddle. At some time in the evening, the painting is lowered into a slot and reveals the statue. This morning we attended Mass in a side chapel of the Gesù. There was only a small congregation at it, but we had enough Latin to follow the Italian Mass and even get a lot of the brief sermon.
At the end of Mass, we went to a café across the road and ordered three lattes. Just remember, if you order 'un latte' in an Italian café, you are likely to be served milk, so the word you are looking for is caffelatte. However, more importantly, if you are standing at the bar, you get a cheaper rate than if you take a seat, so those three lattes, or caffelattes, cost me €3.30 (yes - €1.10 each). In Dublin, I would be doing well to get one for that price. Well, after the break, we went to the Piazza del Venezia.
One of the most iconic of the modern monuments in Rome is the Altare della Patria, which is a huge neo-classical mock temple in the Piazza del Venezia. It has the monument to King Victor Emmanuel II and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I have been at a number of such tombs before, and I would say few are as exalted as that in Rome.
After some time looking at this monument and the Imperial Forum right beside it, we moved on. We climbed up to the church of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli. Then we walked. Past the Colosseum and Forum. Past the Circus Maximus, opposite which we stopped for a brief picnic. Past the Baths of Caracalla. Past the Via Appia. We had two options in mind - the Catacombs of St Callixtus and the Catacombs of Domitilla. We reached the Catacombs of Domitilla first and as they were open and it was possible to visit, that was our objective. Websites are not always very clear.
Well, we were pleasantly surprised in the case of the Catacombs of Domitilla. The Catacombs are under the Divine Word Missionaries, whose Mother House is in Germany. As a result, we were given the option of doing the tour in English or German. There was a tour guide, whom we reckoned to be a priest available to give us the tour in German immediately. This man was passionate about the catacombs and this came across. The Catacombs of Domitilla are the most extensive in Rome and our guide had walked every metre of them. They were the gift of Domitilla who was the granddaughter of the Emperor Vespasian who was a convert to Christianity. From a territorial point of view, though the locations of the catacombs are in the Italian Republic, once you descend down the steps, you are in the Vatican City State.
The catacomb area follows the model of a city. Families are often interred together, but everyone had a separate grave. A lot of the dead were children- there was a very high infant mortality rate. People were smaller. To reach the height of 165 cm (5 feet, 5 inches) was regarded as being gigantic. Digging a grave is relatively easy; our guide told us, it only took him twenty minutes to do so with basic tools. But he put the situation of the Christians in Rome in context. At the height of the Roman Empire, there were a million and a half inhabitants in Rome. When St Paul wrote the Epistle to the Romans, he named about 56 people. Even if these were representative of extended family groups (and many named were related), it would still mean the Christian population of Rome in the first century was a tiny minority. Which is why Nero was able to target it with impunity.
Christians gathered in these areas for worship right through the period of persecution, until the time of Constantine. From this point of view, the decoration of the area is interesting and our guide could point out the earliest artistic representations of the apostles Ss Peter and Paul. Certainly not a puritan or iconoclast community. There were other images besides. I supposed the most important insight was the fact that the presence of a well made it possible for the Christian community in Rome to communicate with each other and exchange information on a daily basis. Our guide put this in the context of life in a German village, but his point was that the internet doesn't necessarily improve on that.
We emerged into the sunlight and went towards St Paul's Outside the Walls. It's hard to believe there was a time you could navigate Rome with actual maps, before the advent of Google Maps. However at one point, we did notice the Via delle Sette Chiese. Well, the Seven Churches have changed somewhat, and this road links St Paul Outside the Walls and St Sebastian Outside the Walls. But this was a good guide. On the way, we got ice cream. We also stopped in a small, very modern church which had a group of generally young nuns doing adoration. This is one of the contrasts in Rome. It is a secular city, but there is a religious presence at nearly every turn. But when our politicians wax lyrically about Europe, they are not thinking about Rome, nor a lot of Southern and Eastern Europe.
We got to St Paul's Outside the Walls. For several reasons, this church is imposing. It's the second biggest church in Rome - St Peter's, of course, is larger. It's built on the site of the beheading of St Paul and his tomb has a central position. When you see the languages around the tomb, the inclusion of Russian is a reminder that this is a place of pilgrimage for the Orthodox as much as for Catholics. I can't say what extent this registers which more traditionally inclined Protestants. Another feature are the portraits of the popes in mosaic from St Peter up until Pope Francis. They are all there with very little space for inclusion of more, leading some of those waiting for the apocalypse to conclude that there is not much time left. We spent some time in and around the church and found to underscore the extraterritorial nature of the basilica, we could buy Vatican stamps in the shop.
We moved on and on the way back bought some freshly baked rolls with a slice of piazza. We passed the pyramid of Cestius and gate of St Paul, before calling on Santa Sabina, which is the mother church of the Dominican Order. It was still open, but the darkness created an atmosphere. After this, we walked back to our appartment. On the way, we witnessed more of the artificial Hallowe'en, with young women in costume. It struck me that these had little problem dressing as either, but it they had to dress as a horror figure, they were going to be attractive witches and vampires.
After the long walk of the day, we had little energy to do anything else on our return.
