Domine Quo Vadis: Footprints at the Fork
Why is it significant?
Stand at the fork where the Via Ardeatina peels away from the Appia and look at the little church squeezed between the two roads, its pale front carrying a Latin inscription.
Key Facts
| Place | Domine Quo Vadis: Footprints at the Fork |
|---|---|
| Address | Via Appia Antica 51, 00179 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.86650, 12.50370 |
| Part of Walk | Queen of Roads: Rome's Appian Way from the Baths of Caracalla to the Catacombs |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the fork where the Via Ardeatina peels away from the Appia and look at the little church squeezed between the two roads, its pale front carrying a Latin inscription. Step inside if the door is open, and in the floor you'll find a slab of marble with two footprints pressed into it, side by side, as if someone had stopped right here and simply stood still.
The legend is told in an apocryphal text of the second century, the Acts of Peter. Nero's persecution has begun, and Peter's friends beg him to save himself. He slips out of the city by night along this road, and at this very spot he meets Christ walking the other way, towards Rome. Domine, quo vadis? Lord, where are you going? And Christ answers: to Rome, to be crucified again. Peter understands. He turns around, walks back into the city, and is crucified, head down, at his own request.
And the footprints? The faithful believed Christ left them in the stone. Archaeologists suggest something stranger: a Roman ex-voto, a thank-offering left at a roadside shrine by a traveller, carved feet meaning I made the journey safely. The original slab is kept in the Basilica of San Sebastiano further down the road, and what you see here is a copy. The church itself, officially Santa Maria in Palmis, received its present front in 1637.
In 1896 the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz turned the legend into a novel, Quo Vadis, an epic of Nero's Rome and the first Christians. It became a worldwide bestseller, helped win him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905, and was filmed again and again, most famously by Hollywood in 1951. Inside the church, a bust of Sienkiewicz placed by his compatriots keeps watch over the footprints.
Think back to the bandage by the Baths of Caracalla: the same flight, the same night, the same road, and here the moment he turned around. Now take the left-hand branch, staying on the Via Appia Antica, and follow it gently uphill between walls and cypresses until a gate on the right opens onto a long avenue of trees.