San Clemente: Three Churches Deep
Why is it significant?
Step into the basilica and let your eyes go straight to the apse. A golden mosaic glows there, a cross growing out of an enormous acanthus plant whose curling tendrils fill the whole vault with birds, deer, peasants and little scenes of daily life.
Key Facts
| Place | San Clemente: Three Churches Deep |
|---|---|
| Address | Via Labicana 95, 00184 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.88930, 12.49750 |
| Part of Walk | Rome in Layers: The Quiet Celian Hill, San Clemente & the Lateran |
| Generated | Generated |
Step into the basilica and let your eyes go straight to the apse. A golden mosaic glows there, a cross growing out of an enormous acanthus plant whose curling tendrils fill the whole vault with birds, deer, peasants and little scenes of daily life. It was made in the twelfth century, and it is one of the most beautiful mosaics in Rome. But the real wonder of San Clemente is under your feet.
In 1857 the Irish Dominican prior, Father Joseph Mullooly, whose order has looked after the church since 1667, began to dig beneath the floor. He found a whole church. The basilica you are standing in was built in the early 1100s on top of an older one, from the fourth century, which had been filled with rubble after Norman troops sacked this area in 1084. Walk down the stairs and you are in it.
Down there, on the walls of that older church, there is an eleventh-century fresco that is famous for its dialogue. A pagan called Sisinnius orders his servants to drag away Saint Clement, but a miracle has turned the saint into a stone column. Painted beside the servants are the words Sisinnius shouts at them, among the earliest written lines of Italian, and they are not polite. Roughly: pull, you sons of whores. Italian literature begins with a swear word in a church.
Go down one more staircase and the air gets cooler. Now you are in the first and second centuries, among the streets and rooms of Roman buildings raised after the Great Fire of 64. In one of them, a low vaulted room with stone benches, is a temple to Mithras, the god of soldiers, with an altar showing him slaying a bull.
And listen. Somewhere in the dark you will hear water running fast, an underground stream still flowing through ancient channels, heading, they say, for the great Roman sewer. Three churches deep, two thousand years down, and the water does not care. Come back up into the daylight, and climb the steep Via dei Querceti to the fortress-like walls at the top.