First a caveat… Depending on how you view my (so far) efforts at learning to use a relatively new camera, choose “Fortunately” or “Unfortunately” to put in front of this sentence: most of the photos in this update will have been taken by someone other than me.
The reason is that, except for a few exterior snaps, photography was forbidden in all three stops on our day-long Dark Rome tour: the Catacombs, the San Clemente Basilica and the Capuchin Crypt.
We met up with our guides – (“If you enjoy the tour today, we’re Mike and Massimo; if you don’t, we’re Bob and Ralph.”) Mike and Massimo at another piazza – this one not too far from Rome’s famed Spanish Steps – the Piazza Barberini. Unfortunately, the piazza’s main attraction at most times is a fountain sculpted in the 17thC by Bernini called Triton, a Graeco-Roman “minor sea god”. "Unfortunately", because today it was completely occluded by a high plywood construction wall and so, instead of admiring the Bernini work, we spent several of the pre-tour minutes looking at the increasing number of other people assembling in the piazza and wondering if they were on the tour, even as they spent several of the pre-tour minutes looking at us and wondering if we were.
With the arrival of several people wearing “Dark Rome” vests and one of them carrying a clipboard, the speed with which most of us gravitated to him provided a swift answer to “Who’s on the tour?”
Turned out there were enough of us to create four separate groups and we were all given one of four different colour dots to stick somewhere on our clothing. Then off we went, by colour-group – two of the colours (us included) to a bus parked nearby to begin one of the most interesting days of our entire Roman experience. (“One of…” There were certainly others.)
From the outset, there were two things emphasized repeatedly to us, almost as a warning. The first was that even though (with one minor exception – read on) there no longer are any human remains in that portion of the Catacombs that we were about to tour, it nonetheless is very much a cemetery and was, in fact, the final resting place for the almost unbelievable number of over a million people!
The second message started with somewhat of an opposite advisory. The Capuchin Crypt is still very much occupied by human remains, but arranged in such a way that it has seemed bizarrely macabre to many of the visitors who have been there over the past 160 or so years since it was opened to the public. Because our tour group included a couple of children, our guides stressed that this part of today’s tour in particular would not exactly be a Disneyland experience and made sure to let the parents know that they should not feel the least bit embarrassed if their children balked at entering the place. (And as you can almost predict, the kids loved it. If anyone felt a little squeamish, it turned out to be some of the adults.)
So, to the Dead-Mobile, Batman!
1. The Catacombs
The first thing that absolutely floored me was the revelation of just how extensive the network of catacombs is that extends under pretty much all of modern-day Rome that has been built up outside the original City Walls. So far, there has been an astonishing 105 km of the underground tombs’ passageways discovered and mapped, and the general belief among archaeologists is that there likely are more – many more – that still remain hidden. In fact, as one of our guides put it, once you step outside the walls of the original City of Rome, there is a high likelihood that there are ancient graves far beneath your feet.
During the trip to the Domatilla Catacombs entrance, one of our guides explained that a previously unknown section of the Catacombs is one of the most frequently discovered antiquity every time a new building foundation is dug, when that building is located outside the boundary of the original Rome’s city walls. And that, if you recall my earlier reference to excavation-related construction delays, is pretty much an automatic sentence of typically a years-long delay, if not outright cancellation depending on the perceived significance of the find. He further suggested that, for those of us staying in a hotel, it can be extremely rewarding to ask a staff person if the hotel is built on any “scavi” (ruins) and that we should not be surprised to be taken to a hidden access door at the back of a basement broom closet! Such finds are that frequent.
Neither a map of the London Underground nor a map of the trench systems on the Western Front in WWI even holds a candle to the complexity of a map of Rome’s City of the Dead.
Part of the reason that such an extensive network exists outside the walls of the original City of Rome is that burial inside the walls had always been forbidden. And part of the reason the network is so vast is that Rome – indeed much of Italy – sits atop a foundation of volcanic stone called tufa, and tufa is very easy to dig. (In fact, as we discovered, you can run your fingernail across a tufa rock face and you will leave scratch marks.) The Catacombs would eventually come to include whole excavated rooms where wealthier families would lay their dead for several generations in personal-sized cutaways in the walls.
Making things even odder, in a circumstance that turns traditional archaeological excavation on its temporal ear, the older Catacombs are the ones closest to the surface and, as more space came to be needed, later levels were added by digging below the existing crypts, creating not merely an underground network of “streets”, but a network, effectively, of whole apartment blocks underground for occupancy by the dead.
Actually, maybe “condo” is a better parallel to draw. Catacomb occupants were not likely to be renewing leases and paying rent by the month.
Specific to our tour, we went into just one small portion of a 15km network that is the oldest and yet is considered among the best preserved of all the Catacombs found so far: The Catacombs of Domatilla (named after – Surprise! – St Domatilla).
Damp. The Catacombs are first and foremost damp. And cool. Even on hot days, a sweater or jacket is recommended. (It’s also the reason that a tufa cave makes for an excellent wine cellar as we’ll see later on.) Eerie? No. But at one time they would have been. The Domatilla Catacombs have some modern enhancements, like electric lights and a means of circulating some exchange in the air. But before electric light and ventilation, the Catacombs were so dark they required candlelight and yet so short of a fresh supply of oxygen that in roughly 20 minutes a candle would be extinguished because of oxygen starvation.
Imagine yourself – on second thought, DON’T imagine yourself – a couple levels underground in a damp, narrow passageway into which you had taken who knows how many twists and turns after entering at ground level, when suddenly your candle flame dies for lack of oxygen. (No points for guessing what will be next to die from lack of oxygen. Yes, people died of asphyxiation in the Catacombs.)
I tell a lie when I say there are no human remains. This applies only to the oldest of the Catacombs – and the Domatilla Catacomb is, as already noted, one of the oldest. But our guide did stop at one crypt and, using a narrow-beam flashlight, illuminated what he said most archaeologists agree is a toe bone. Apparently some of the more recently discovered and opened Catacombs are revealing some remarkably well-preserved remains, as well as some very elaborate frescoes decorating the walls of some of the multi-generational family “rooms”.
As Michelin would say, worth a diversion.
2. The San Clemente Basilica
On the Dark Rome tour, the Basilica was referred to as the “lasagna” church because of the several layers that its foundations descend. They indicate that the present-day basilica sits on the rebuilt or strengthened foundations of no fewer than four (with a fifth quite recently suspected) previous structures to occupy the same place.
That it has become the amazing excavation it is today the archaeological world owes to the almost maddening persistence of a Dominican scholar in residence probably two or three hundred years ago. As the story goes, he drove his fellow theology classmates crazy with his repeated insistence that he heard water running somewhere “under the floor”. And so began a series of excavations undertaken by the Dominicans themselves.
What they found is now generally held to be one of the finest layered excavations in Rome and today, after beginning in the present-day basilica, visitors progress downwards through the foundations for each of these structures:
i. The present-day, or second, basilica: (Although “present-day” only means “most recent”. It was actually built sometime between 1099 and 1120 A.D., although it underwent a considerable renovation in the early 1700s.) Descending into its basement, visitors find themselves in…
ii. The first basilica, which existed from approximately 390 to 1099 A.D. Of particular interest on the walls of this earlier basilica is a fresco that was deliberately designed to make organized religion more appealing to the ordinary people of the day, who generally were less educated, if not completely illiterate and, thus, right out of touch with the formal Latin language used for church services. This particular fresco shows a purported miracle of San Clement, who is said to have tricked his captors into thinking they were dragging him off as a prisoner when, in fact, they were dragging a large log.
But it is the dialogue they are speaking that still startles scholars to this day. As the hapless would-be captors drag their log along the ground, one of them is berating the others and painted right into the fresco is this text that he is shouting to them in the street Italian of the day, “Fili de le pute, traite! Gosmari, Albertel, traite! Falite dereto colo palo, Carvoncelle!", which translates into English as: "Come on, you sons of whores, pull! Come on, Gosmari, Albertello, pull! Carvoncello, give it to him from the back with the pole!"
When our guide first indicated the text and asked if anyone knew what it meant, Leslie happily volunteered to have a go at it based on several classes she took of introductory Italian. As she started in on “Fili de le pute,” she said, “Sons of the… father?”, then said, “No, not ‘father’…” then gasped when she suddenly realized the actual translation, which in turn caused our guide Massimo to crack up before he finished the translation and told us the story behind its inclusion in this particular fresco.
No doubt to placate the senior clergy of the day, a more “proper” translation into ceremonial Latin is also included in the same fresco, and it is painted in the outline of a cross shape for good measure. It reads, “Duritiam cordis vestris, saxa trahere meruistis", which translates into the more politically correct exhortation, "You deserved to drag stones due to the hardness of your hearts."
Whether the gutter / street Italian version ever contributed to drawing in a bigger crowd for weekly mass has not been recorded.
Descending below the floor of the first basilica, visitors now find themselves in:
Trivia digression time! It is the Cult of Mithras that is almost entirely responsible for the fact we celebrate the birth of Jesus on December 25. At the time, the Mithraists threw what was essentially a heck of a fun week-long party in conjunction with the winter solstice (December 22) and a lot of Christian clergy were becoming alarmed at how their own congregations were increasingly being bled off as members of their flock left to join the Mithraists. So the Christian clergy simply and arbitrarily declared that, “Hey, guess what? Jesus was born just a couple days later, and so we’ll have a religious celebration at the same time!” And the rest is history.
So when was Jesus really born? Well, the exact date is uncertain but there is a huge clue in the fact that in the Bible’s versions of the Divine birth, reference is made to the event’s occurring “while shepherds were watching their flocks”. “(There’s even a Christmas Carol entitled, “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night”):
And historical records of the time (essentially a book entitled “Shepherding for Dummies”) are unanimous. The only time shepherds actually stood watch over their flocks was during lambing season and sheep biology was as consistent then as it is now. Lambs are born in the Spring. So by rights, if we were true to the biblical record, we should be celebrating the Bethlehem birth sometime in late April at the earliest, or more probably sometime in May. (Man, it boggles the mind to think of all the family Christmas travel that wouldn’t have had to be mucked up by snowstorms over the centuries! Damn those Mithraists, anyway!)(Oh... wait. I guess they already are.)
And remember our Dominican’s assertion that he was sure he heard water “somewhere under the floor”? The Mithraeum in fact wasn’t fully uncovered until 1867 because when it was first opened up (wait for it), it was completely submerged! When the water was finally drained off, archaeologists discovered beneath it -- not the water table and bedrock -- but the foundations and workshops of what is now believed to be:
iv. the Imperial Mint of Rome. And in there, along one wall, finally, an excavation turned up the very well-preserved section of a side channel of Rome’s famous system of aqueducts, through which water was still flowing, the same babbling brook that had so long ago disturbed the good night’s sleep of our Dominican theology student with the almost super-human hearing!
Most online descriptions of the “lasagna church” largely end there, but our guide told us that as recently as within the past couple years, some exploratory excavation work has turned up evidence of an even older floor mosaic, definitely not the sort of thing one would expect to find in what was essentially a Roman coin factory. Other probing has apparently located evidence of walls and possibly even rooms, and there is a growing belief that there is yet another layer of ricotta in the lasagna – a private residence that gives some early indications it might have been destroyed in the Great Fire of Rome in 64 A.D. How old it is – in other words, when was it first built? – remains to be seen. And below it… who knows? (Cue the theme from “The Twilight Zone”.)
3. The Capuchin Crypts
"What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be..." (Motto posted on one wall of one of the Capuchin Crypts’ chapels.)
If the Capuchin Crypts didn’t reflect such a devout belief in the ultimate resurrection of the body and, consequently, the need to preserve it for that Final Judgement Day, they would be almost hilariously macabre.
How else to describe five separate chapels, each of which is effectively a carefully constructed work of art and which, collectively, are assembled entirely from the bones of some 4,000 monks who died over a period roughly from 1520 to 1870? And how can you not laugh at a colloquial designation like the “hip crypt”, because its decorations – including chandelier light fixtures that hang over your head – are made entirely from human pelvises? But the one that almost – note that, almost – made me lose my own respectful composure was when our guide indicated a representation of the Dominican Order’s Coat of Arms that was made of, yep, human arm bones.
Noted travel writer Arthur Frommer describes it as “one of the most horrifying images in all of Christendom”. By way of contrast, the Marquis de Sade, after visiting it in 1775, declared it to have been worth the effort.
But really, if ever there were an example of the old saw, a picture is worth a thousand words, this is it. So here is a 4,000+ word equivalency on the Capuchin Crypts (all, of course, from other cameras than mine because visitor photography in the Crypts is forbidden.)
Depending on how much this tweaks your curiosity, I commend to you a simple Google image search of “Rome, Capuchin Crypt”. If, on the other hand, you feel you’re sufficiently boned up (sorry) on Dominican afterlife interior design (as we certainly were when we arrived, head-shakingly, at the last of these five Crypts), then let’s move on, shall we?
But before we do, might I also send you streaming to the exits to the tune of this brief musical interlude? (Oh, come on! You just KNEW this was coming!)
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