Santi Nereo e Achilleo: The Church of the Lost Bandage
Why is it significant?
Cross to the quiet side of the avenue and find the plain front of a small church set back behind its trees, easy to miss on the way to somewhere grander. Most people do miss it. Its doors are often closed, which only adds to the feeling that it is keeping something to itself. It is.
Key Facts
| Place | Santi Nereo e Achilleo: The Church of the Lost Bandage |
|---|---|
| Address | Viale delle Terme di Caracalla 28, 00153 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.88020, 12.49480 |
| Part of Walk | Queen of Roads: Rome's Appian Way from the Baths of Caracalla to the Catacombs |
| Generated | Generated |
Cross to the quiet side of the avenue and find the plain front of a small church set back behind its trees, easy to miss on the way to somewhere grander. Most people do miss it. Its doors are often closed, which only adds to the feeling that it is keeping something to itself.
It is. In late antiquity this place was known as the titulus Fasciolae, the church of the little bandage. The story goes that Saint Peter, escaping from prison during Nero's persecution, hurried down this road towards the Appian Way, and the bandage wrapped around his leg, rubbed raw by chains, slipped off and fell right here. The faithful marked the spot. Hold on to that legend, because Peter has an appointment a little further down the road.
The church is dedicated to Nereus and Achilleus, two soldiers who, according to tradition, threw down their weapons when they became Christians and died as martyrs. They were buried in a catacomb on the Via Ardeatina, south of the city. In the centuries that followed, as the countryside emptied and grew dangerous, the relics of many martyrs were carried from those cemeteries into churches inside the walls.
Pope Leo the Third rebuilt the church around the year 800, and the mosaic on the arch above the altar survives from his time, with the Transfiguration of Christ between Moses and Elijah, flanked by the Annunciation. Then, in the 1590s, the great Church historian Cardinal Cesare Baronius, whose titular church this was, restored it for the Jubilee of 1600 and filled the walls with frescoes of martyrdoms, painted to make pilgrims flinch.
Baronius loved this place so much that he left a Latin inscription addressed to whoever would be its cardinal after him, begging his successor to take nothing away, reduce nothing and change nothing. A four-hundred-year-old plea for conservation. Now walk on to the little square just beyond, and take the narrow road on the right between high garden walls, Via di Porta San Sebastiano. This is where the Appian Way truly begins.