San Sebastiano: Where the Word Catacomb Was Born
Why is it significant?
Come out onto the little square and face the basilica: a calm seventeenth-century portico on paired columns, pale against the pines. It looks almost modest for one of the seven great pilgrim churches of Rome. The secret, as always on this road, is what lies underneath.
Key Facts
| Place | San Sebastiano: Where the Word Catacomb Was Born |
|---|---|
| Address | Via Appia Antica 136, 00179 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.85590, 12.51580 |
| Part of Walk | Queen of Roads: Rome's Appian Way from the Baths of Caracalla to the Catacombs |
| Generated | Generated |
Come out onto the little square and face the basilica: a calm seventeenth-century portico on paired columns, pale against the pines. It looks almost modest for one of the seven great pilgrim churches of Rome. The secret, as always on this road, is what lies underneath.
In ancient times the road here ran past a hollow in the ground, where stone had once been quarried. The place was known as ad catacumbas, by the hollows. Christians began burying their dead in galleries dug beneath it, and for centuries the name belonged to this one cemetery alone. Only much later, when the others were rediscovered, did catacomb become the word for every underground burial ground in the world.
Below the church, archaeologists found a small third-century courtyard with a bench, where people gathered for funeral meals. Its plaster is covered with graffiti scratched by visitors, prayers in rough Latin and Greek to the apostles Peter and Paul, such as a plea to both of them to pray for a man named Victor. For some decades, it seems, the two apostles were honoured here, and some believe their relics were briefly hidden here during the persecution of 258. Nobody has ever proved it.
Then came Sebastian, the soldier-martyr shot full of arrows, patron of archers and of plague victims. Tradition says he survived the arrows, confronted the emperor, was beaten to death, and was buried in this cemetery. Inside the basilica, a chapel of relics displays an arrow and part of a column said to be linked to his martyrdom. And the original Quo Vadis footprints you heard about at the fork are kept there too.
In 2001, a scholar identified a marble bust of Christ in the convent here as the last sculpture of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, carved when he was in his eighties. It had been sitting there, almost unnoticed, for generations. Now walk on along the Appia. Just beyond, on the left, a long field of ruins opens behind a gate. That is where an emperor built his own racetrack.